For faster IDs, I developped a Windows Forms application, as a replacement for the console application mentioned above.
The key features are:
- Load observations and photos in a cache (RAM + HDD), in order not to wait for downloading.
- Browse observations, with up to 4 medium size pictures displayed.
- Select a taxon ID in a configurable list of preferred taxa.
- Submit an identification with the preselected taxon ID, in 1 click or 1 keystroke.
- Submit a configurable comment about multi-species observations, in 1 click or 1 keystroke.
- Perform all actions in the application with the keyboard or the mouse.
- Open the observation in a web browser, if needed for checking or rolling back a mistake.
- Display the ID submitted in the application, immediateley and permanently.
- Queue the indentification/comment requests and process them in the background, to respect the API rhythm, without having to wait.
- Status bar to follow the treatments in the background.
It can be operated in different ways:
- Identify observations sequentially in a single round, changing the preselected ID many times.
- Identify observations in several rounds, for instance all Fungi first, then all Plantae.
- Checkbox for skipping observations identified in a previous round, for browsing faster the remaining.
- Button for permanently skipping an observation when browsing.
Future possibilities:
- Support for configurable taxon shortcuts, which would enable many more predefined taxa than those available in the drop down list.
If someone would like to try this tool, it is available…
Selection of one of the predefined taxon, for identifying the observation:
Note that the status bar at the bottom of the picture above indicates that the application is still downloading more observations in the background.
The indentation of the taxon names in the drop down list is entirely automated.
Identification being processed (see the status bar at the bottom), with the ID already attached to the observation (see “ID submitted:”, below the photo):
Clic on the “Multiple species” button in order to submit a predefined comment (see the status bar indicating that the comment is being processed), then clic on the button “Submit this ID” for identifying these multiple species as “Phylum Tracheophyta”:
Clic on the button “Open observation in web browser”, for checking the result:
Settings file, with an URL for selecting the observations to identify, and a single line for defining the IDs of all taxa to be displayed in the drop down list:
There is also a separate text file for the comment in the case of a multiple species observation.
There is a taxonomy data cache in another text file, populated automatically, for ensuring the consistency of the taxon names displayed in the drop down list with the taxon IDs used for identifying, without having to check them all again at every startup of the application.