Add map in app, allow offline access to own observation data

I must be awful at searching, because I can’t believe nobody has asked for this before:

I like to go back to an area and see how different individual organisms change during the year. Sometimes I just want to check on an ID, because at the time I first observed the organism, the identifying characteristics were not visible. Of course, my memory can’t possibly handle the number of organisms nor the exact locations where I found them, so I feel like I always forget about 80% of what I wanted to check up on. It would therefore be unbelievably useful if the app had a map with our own observation data, preferably with offline access to names and mapped locations. Photos would of course require way too much memory. I guess one potential solution would be if we could select a specific area to save, and it would only save small/thumbnail images… but even just having the names and locations on a map would be incredibly useful, and that’s all I’m really asking for.

I’m aware that we could just go to the site on the phone and use that, but 1) that sort of defeats the purpose of having a separate app 2) that still requires internet, which is often not available and/or uses data. 3) it’s not as user friendly and requires a lot more time, if it’s even usable at all. Personally I can’t really click on pins when using my phone because they’re just too small and don’t respond, so that doesn’t work for me.

i’m guessing what you’re asking for in terms of providing offline map data + mappable observations in an app would be super complex from a technical perspective. i suspect the benefit likely would not justify the cost to do this.

i’m not sure which app you’re talking about, but in the Android app, there maps available in the Explore screen (as long as you have a data connection):

you may want to read this other thread, too: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/locally-store-map-tiles/3457. it’s sort of in limbo and it doesn’t directly discuss what you’re talking about, but it might give you a sense of what others have said about offline mapping in general. for example:

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I had a similar request I’ll add here:

Implement offline search of own observations by arbitrary taxa in mobile app

I frequently use the mobile app as my personal herbaria, and suspect others do too, and often don’t have phone service to access the web interface. I’d love a feature where I can search my own observations for all records that match a particular taxa (e.g. poaceae) offline.

I suspect this would require major development work but wanted to put it out there anyway.

I think this functionality would only really work well if there were also a feature where I can control how many observations the app caches locally. I’m not sure how to state this in light of the ‘one feature request per post’ rule.

I do wish at least the un-uploaded pins would display on the map as it makes it really useful in terms of keeping track of where i have been since the last upload, etc. This is how the app used to work um, a decade ago (wow i am old and so is iNat :) ) but it hasn’t worked that way for a while (overall the app is MUCH improved but i do miss that one feature).
On the other hand i am now able to track my location in Garmin watch, avenza, etc etc so it’s become less important to me

I requested something like this as a feature back in January 2020

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