Hello Everyone,
I am having trouble sorting and filtering my observations after uploading with pinned location data. I would like to have personal project pages for all observations in specific pinned locations, but it seems I can only search and filter using recognized “Places”.
Is it possible to search and sort through my observations using my pinned location names? It seems like I am only able to filter using existing “Places”, despite the observations being listed with the pinned location name. This makes it very difficult to sort my observations since I am in the habit of using pinned locations during upload and then find myself unable to sort them once they are posted.
I have been dissuaded from creating a “Place” because the locations are small and intended for personal organization.
I have also considered using “Tags”. This does not seem ideal, but I would settle for it if I could edit multiple existing observations. Is that even possible?
Again, I am looking for a solution to help me create personal project pages for observations in custom locations without burdening the system by creating a “Place”. What are my options?
Thank you for reading! I hope that makes sense. I look forward to hearing your suggestions.
Hi James, welcome to the iNat Forum! I think the only location on the website that pinned locations are currently searchable is on the observation upload page, e.g.:
As long as your observations have open geoprivacy, you can use the Explore page to zoom into a particular location and click “Redo search in map” to achieve a similar effect to searching for a particular pinned location, e.g.:
I don’t use pinned locations very frequently, but I do bookmark these types of filtered searches for observations in places of personal interest, just as browser bookmarks.
It is possible to add tags in bulk editing, ie Edit Observations page.
I am exploring how they work, as it seems by clicking on the tag itself, in an Observation, one brings up all obs with that tag, ( and can then filter the results by eg Place, or Observer, if needed).
But the results from clicking on a Tag include all sorts of things, i cant figure out what the criterion is, perhaps any observation which has tags which combined include those letters? I havent figured that out yet, but am currently adding new tags, longer so more tedious to add, but likely to be more exclusive, ie an unlikely string of letters to be used.
Regarding using pinned locations with personalized location names, I do this too, and it has many benefits, eg when viewing observations as a list I can see which ones are where.
And in Edit Observations, I can search on the location name I have used, select “Places” from the dropdown beside that field, and then bulk edit eg add tags.
NB tags cant be bulk removed.
And searching using the same pinned address in Explore does not work as well, as that page searches the Description also.
if a set of observations using the same pinned location share the exact same center point, then instead of a defining a square bounding box, you could define a circular search area. that way you can copy and paste the exact lat and long for a single point instead of trying to deal with 4 corners of a box.
interestingly, i originally thought i would have to define a radius that is greater than or equal to the accuracy circle of the observations (just translated from m to km), but it looks like circle-based searches don’t seem to care about the size of the observation’s accuracy circles. (so i’ve just used radius=0.01 in the above example.)
sure - though to be clear, clicking the “Redo search in map” button doesn’t require typing anything into a URL/dealing with corners, but a lat/long circle search is bit more precise and cleaner looking
