Yup, I do it too sometimes when it’s an escaped plant and I asked the author if it’s wild.
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I try to add annotations where I can. (Especially for things like larval moths and butterflies. or projects reporting organism deaths and causes.) However between the App not having that option available and the added steps involved with going back on a web upload It sometimes falls by the wayside. I agree the annotations are very important and should receive more attention than they do at present.
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I think “Can the community ID be improved” is the only DQA setting I’ve seen used proactively set to a Yes. All the others I’ve only seen used reactively to counter a No.
As @zabdiel and @fffffffff mentioned, there’s really no need to set a Yes on the DQAs on upload: If they are left as-is, the observation will get to RG without any user votes in either direction needed, so there’s nothing that needs to be affirmed (except for the occasions where the system marks captive automatically).
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Do you mean in iPhone? Because I do see annotations available on other user’s records in-app in Android (both on New observations in Explore and on ones I’ve reviewed in Activity>Following), and on my own (admittedly, after submitting & syncing, not during creation).
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I think applying annotations per photo would be more accurate, but implementing this might be too complex for iNat staff to take up the suggestion.
If we did have the ability to annotate each photo, then I could mark this photo as “Fruiting” and this other photo as both “Budding” and “Flowering”. And the image search functionality could allow me to reliably find photos that show only Fruiting specimens, or specimens that are Fruiting and possibly also Flowering or Budding.
But how does that relate to the parent observation? Are the annotations for that automatically derived from the union of all the annotations on the photos? That might degrade the usefulness of observation searches and phenology graphs. Also, the annotation choices are dependent on the observation taxon and it might be very tricky to extend this logic to offer the right choices to an observer uploading photos.
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I’d really like to be able to enter this information before submitting the observation. I often enter 20-30 observations in a single session. Having to remember to go back and enter this information means that I may not remember, while I would probably do better if I can added it when I enter the other information.
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I’m pretty sure that in some cases I’ve added annotations and they didn’t stick. In other cases, they couldn’t be accessed at all for later addition. Each has to process individually. If I choose more than one annotation for an observation before the first has been processed, the others won’t stick. I’ve given up except for special observations.
I’m using the phone app.
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I’ve enjoyed this discussion, hopefully it’s not been too many tangents for your original question @faerout
One minor reason why annotations don’t get more action is that you can’t batch edit annotations on observations. For example, I am trying to annotate Dead on multiple fish observations, and it’s tedious to open each observation one by one to annotate. (Very possible I don’t know some iNat trick to do so, however, so someone please correct me if wrong.)
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Your own observations or other people’s?
Based on some requests in both the old Google group and this forum, I don’t think you can batch annotate other user’s observations.
You cant batch update anything on other user’s records. You can batch edit annotations on your own records.
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Cool! From a specific page, or just from Identify?
No, from the edit observations link under your profile icon.
On there you can batch update observation fields. Every annotation is linked to one or more observation fields so that when the observation field is populated it automatically populates the annotation
You just need to figure out what the observation fields are.
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Good trick – thank you!
Yes, I am using the IOS App.and have to do my annotations when I return from the field.
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