On different occasions in the forum I have now seen it mentioned that there is a growing discrepancy in numbers between the amount of observers and identifiers.
From my experience the Identification tool on the homepage is already extremely well done. For some specific tasks though, e.g. identifying lots of observations coarsely, I think there might be some improvements. I would like to help to make identifying a bit easier and a bit more fun.
I am a smartphone app developer and have made a rough “tinder” like identifying app. For now I have followed only my own needs in the development. However, I am looking for some people who want to try it out and give me some feedback to see if that is something that the community could possibly use. Also to see where it would need to be developed further.
If you are interested wave here or better send me a DM in iNat. Currently, I have an iPhone and Android version to test.
Hi! Here is some feedback after trying your ID app for a little while:
Can you make the stack start with observations that are at least a day or two old — maybe even older, e.g. observations that are a week or month old? The first observations that appear are frequently identified very shortly after I give them a coarse ID. I think it’s a bit of wasted effort/nuisance notifications adding such coarse IDs to very new observations.
Or add a “date uploaded” date range filter so I can look at older observations?
Can you make a setting for whether or not I want to follow the observation after I ID it (related feature request) ? At this point, I think you would have to make it manually unfollow every observation after an ID is made.
Any plans to add the ability to add any ID? I often want to “skip” the observation because I can add a finer ID and don’t want to be limited to Plant/Animal/Fungi.
If you do add the ability to add any ID, skipping an observation should probably mark it as “reviewed” for me so it doesn’t keep showing up in the stack.
I’d sent in similar comments via a message but just wanted to say I totally agree. Except if there’s no way to add finer Id, I may want to not mark as reviewed, so I can add on the website later if I know it. But yeah, filtering for older ids is crucial. If that were figured out I could really whip through hundreds of these just in bits of spare time.
Hej you guys!
Thanks for the valuable feedback! I have added a filter setting now that let’s you look in reverse sort order, that means oldest observations first. This way it might be a better approach to sort through the backlog first. I’ll keep adding in your feedback with more time, so thanks!
Oh very neat, will try that out for sure. I think the next step if it is possible is to opt out of notifications, though with those getting a revamp it may not end up worth the coding time as they may get easier to deal with.
Another possible option would be to be able to mark things as captive. Should be used sparingly since you don’t have all possible info on the map, but for obvious ones like houseplants it could be nice.
There is an option to opt out of notifications categorically: e.g. Plantae = unsubscribe. If you do that for all categories you receive no notifications altogether. Fine granular would be better of course.
that makes sense. Just to be clear, that wont affect my notifications for other things i ID on the app or website, right? I just don’t want to be notified for things in Europe or Asia i add coarse IDs to. I want to keep getting notifications for things i ID to a more fine scale.
Yes, correct. It does not affect anything you ID on the website. It only affects the IDs you make in my app for this category, and only as long as the switch is in the unsubscribe position (off in this case).
I much prefer this, but now I need to be able to mark some as reviewed if I haven’t added an ID. Otherwise I have to skip a bunch every time I open the app again - the observations where I am not even sure what kingdom it is.
Yes, that is a great idea. I wonder though if it should be for all skipped observations automatically, or with a question when skipping. Will have to try it out sometime.
Thank you!
I think it should ask each time. It is a big mixture of a) skipping due to not knowing the kingdom and b) skipping due to wanting to ID finer than animal/plant/fungi (and I wouldn’t want the latter ones to be marked as reviewed).
Hej there,
had some time and have tried around a bit. I have now added a button to the lower right to skip the observation and also mark it as reviewed. That means if you swipe to the bottom the observation is still just skipped and not marked as reviewed. If you hit the button it is automatically swiped to the bottom and marked as reviewed as well.
Let me know what you think of it.
I wonder which of the two should be the standard though. If I add the possibility of adding a finer ID on the spot, maybe skipping should review by default.
Cheers
For the first scenario, I’ve actually just been setting the filter to show only observations with a single photo every time. I don’t think I would use a predefined comment b/c I’d rather do that type of more detailed task on the computer than my phone.
And for the second case I think it’s better to take a look on the full observation in case there are any comments, tags, observation fields, or projects it may be included in that hint to which subject they’re focusing om. So I just skip those mostly.
Okay thanks for your input! I have put some predefined comments into the app now just for me to try it out. For you means that the skip and review button is now two taps.
I have also added a feature to send yourself the list of observations you have skipped directly into the iNaturalist Identify page so you can continue on the homepage.
And I have added an icon to show when an observation has some comments.
And you can mark observations as captive/cultivated now.
It would be nice to somehow mark observations/images as “useless/unusable” for example when the image is blurry or the focus of the image is not obvious.
I really love the idea of this swype to ID interface. I like the initial framework, and I’d love to see it develop into deeper sorting and customization options within the framework that you have set up. (both on searching for observation types and ID swype types).
I’d also like to be able to open an observation on the inat website, then I could give a species level ID to something right away even if it wasn’t set up in the swype options. Currently I ID it to the kingdom level, then open up my browser, go to recent IDs, and find the post to add the ID there.
Minor formatting issue- I use a Samsung S7, and the paragraph formating on the “how does it work” page overlaps the “OK GOT IT” link https://photos.app.goo.gl/LCRMemS73XVcGrfN9
Thanks for this tool :) It replaced fidgeting in a recent all day meeting that I had to sit though.
Thank you Erin for your time testing the app.
If you want to have some deeper sorting and customization, let me know what specifically, so that I can put it in.
I have added an extra button to the swipe interface to show the observation in the browser directly. I have not used it that much myself. If there is something that I want to ID more specifically I skip it and send me the list of all skipped observations and do the specific IDs from there. But let me know how it fits your needs.
I found one topic talking about creating a section in the forum to make e.g. urgent unidentified observations more imminent and apparent. Your app could be exactly for this purpose where
people can mark observation as “urgent” or “rare”
and these observations will pop up in your app.
Then they can swipe left and right if they want to identify them deeper. If no -> next observation. If yes -> Taxon suggestions from the iNav api and the possibility to name the Taxon!
I would definitely subscribe for “place=myCity” and “Taxon=Sempervivum”!