I’d like to be able to ID offline. I’d like it for the desktop app too, as i fly a lot, don’t usually pay for internet connection, and find iNat IDing to be an excellent way to pass the time :-)
If you write the common or scientific name correctly (android app) then as soon as you get connection the identifications will upload linked to the species. I just tried this over the weekend.
What would be interesting is an option to download a database of nearby species to check offline!
I think, or at least my interpretation of the request is to be able to identify other people’s records while offline, not your own.
but don’t you need to be online to download photos and such? are you basically asking for a way to download a set of observations including photos, etc.?
I am indeed looking for a way to ID other people’s obs offline. It would require (presumably) downloading a set of obs ahead of time, and then having a species database offline, and having the CV being able to work offline. The latter might be a bridge too far, but at least being able to search and browse the offline data would be handy. I’m sure I can think up other requirements, but that’s a start :-)
i think this might be too much work for what i would think is too niche an application.
if you’re IDing, i’m guessing you’d probably do it on a tablet or laptop on the plane, and you’d be using the website for that. you’d have to change up the website to download and cache a bunch of stuff on your device and then repoint everything to use either the cache or online, which i’m not sure would be technically possible to do or at least it would be very hacky…
i doubt they would make a native app for tablets and computers because then that’s one more thing to support. they could do something like a Chrome app, but you still leave people out.
you might be able to do it on a phone app, but then think about what you have to download. you have to get a full set of maps, which could be many GB, depending on your scope, and that’s assuming iNat would have the rights to distribute those maps. and then you’d have to download all the photos and metadata.
the vision is out of the question. downloading the full set of taxa might be possible, but all the pictures that go with that would be a lot.
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I got the intent from the first post, but probably because I also have thought it would be useful, so matched it to my own thinking…
I agree. I think it would be neat but probably not a priority for us while we’re still trying to survive our current rate of growth. This might be a fun project for a third party developer, though.
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