Description of need:
Current annotations require opening each observation one by one, making bulk work unnecessarily tedious—even with keyboard shortcuts. After processing tens of thousands, I find many annotations (e.g., Lepidoptera life stages) are obvious from thumbnails.
Feature request details:
An optional bulk-annotation mode that:
Adds a toggle button in the Identify toolbar (default off to maintain simplicity for casual users)
Enables thumbnail checkboxes (like “Mark as Reviewed,” but distinct)
Opens a batch-annotation panel after selection (e.g., apply “Life Stage: adult” to many obs at once)
This specific implementation is just a starting point for discussion. Any bulk annotation tool – even if quite different from this proposal – would dramatically improve workflow efficiency for users!
Thanks for your time and consideration :)
I approved for discussion, but the design philosophy has been that we want people to evaluate all the evidence of each observation rather than just use thumbnails.
Current annotations do not require opening each observation one by one, but that might be a misunderstanding of what you mean.
While on a observation in the identify mode and the annotations tab you can use the left and right arrows to go through observations.
After timing myself using keyboard shortcuts and collapsing projects and observation fields to speed up loading, at a leisurely pace it took 1:36 to annotate flowering phenology on 30 observations, an average of 3.2 seconds per observation.
You can’t accurately see all pictures from a thumbnail and might miss the thing to annotate if it is not in the first photo.
You can use fairly simple keyboard macros in the Annotations tab of Identify to add annotations very quickly if you limit your annotating to one attribute field at a time.
Let’s consider you have 30 imagos in a given “Identify” page. You want to annotate they are “Life stage: adults”; “Evidence of Presence: Organism”; “Alive or Dead: Alive”.
using the current configuration, even with keyboards shortcuts, requires to go through 30 different obs (press open once and 29 times the right arrow), wait a small delay for each obs to load, press 30×6 annotating fields – 210 clicks required
with a bulk annotation tool, this would take 30 clicks for selection (might be more reliable than “select: all”) then 7 clicks to apply the same annotations to all obs – 37 clicks total
Accounting for the loading time when going through observations using arrows, the tool I am advocating for would allow one to be about 10 times more efficient.
I’ve made quite a few annotations (mostly Lepidoptera) and at times I’ve thought that a bulk annotation option would be useful, but all things considered, I do think it’s best to annotate each observation individually.
To be more efficient, I’ll often do a quick visual scan of a page of 30 observations to check that all moths/butterflies are adults, then whip through and annotate them all as such. I always do another slower scan afterwards, before moving to the next page, and I find that I often miss caterpillars / pupae / webbing / leafmines in that first quick look, so then I go back and fix those annotations. If users aren’t considering each image individually, it would be very easy to make annotation mistakes.
With how difficult (sometimes impossible) it is to overturn incorrect annotations made by other users, this could become quite an issue.
Also, I use annotations as a way to review observations. While annotating, I can add identifications, catch misidentifications, and assess DQA. DQA issues in particular are very easy to miss when you’re just scanning thumbnails.
Yes, it’s a pain that disagreeing with an annotation of ‘no flowers or fruit’ (for example) still won’t allow you to annotate what’s actually there - one or more of those that the annotator didn’t recognise or notice.