Allow users to set persistent parameters for the Compare tool in Identify

I’ve been doing a lot of gall ID lately, and the distinctions between species often comes down to host plants. The compare tool can be helpful for this, questioning or reinforcing my own evaluation of the host plant species. But it’s extremely annoying to use, because every time I move to the next observation, it resets back to the gallformer taxon rather than “plants.” It’s especially annoying because it’s so slow and unresponsive. I’d like to simply be able to tell the Compare tool what settings I want to use and have it keep those until I manually change them, rather than having them reset to what it thinks I want to see.

Can you please share a screenshot of Compare settings you would like to save?

For instance, reviewing family Eriophyidae, I want to see Visually Similar–Plants but it keeps defaulting back to either Visually Similar–Eriophyidae or even just the genus the observation is already set at.

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:+1:

Great work. I’ve gotten dozens of notifications from observations which have been needing ID for years, and it looks like you’ve been identifying hundreds more.

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Thanks. This seems fairly niche, although obviously pretty useful in these situations. Were you imagining a checkbox on the Compare tab that says something like “retain filters”? Would you want it to persist if you closed the Identify tab and went to Identify at some point later?

A sticky behavior similar to what the map/aerial view now does would work.

Related thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/compare-suggestions-source-visually-similar-filter-by-taxon-by-default/673

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I would be satisfied with either of those. It’s fine to have to set parameters for every new session but if you’re going through 100 similar observations it’d be nice if you didn’t have to change them every time you click over. If that preference was stored by session or account doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me, though making it persist in the account is probably ideal.

I also think it would make more sense to have the CV default to the whole tree of life, rather than the current genus.

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