Description of need:
Users routinely duplicate observations for multiple species - diligent users routinely add links to all others, but iNat can automate that with auto-adding parent ID observation to above popular observation field. It will aid both IDers better to associate interactions when IDing the duplicated observation (instead of going to their profile and searching for other observation if its not linked manually) and knowing what they want to be IDed in duplicated one … It is also a valuable datapoint for future taxa associations analysis research so even when users forget to link those - auto-linking will help.
Maybe others can comment if there are negative caveats for such automation above. Or it can be some setting where users can opt-in/out too if there are caveats.
Feature request details:
When users click duplicate option on app or mobile, auto-populate and link the parent observation url with the above field for new observations.
i’m not sure that using an observation field to link observations is the best way to handle the situation. observation fields are meant to handle custom user needs. so if you’re going to modify the system to do something, you should just add system functionality for that, not try to leverage an observation field.
when you duplicate a photo before it’s been fully uploaded via the web uploader, you can actually end up with two different photo records.
when you duplicate an observation on the Android app, you also end up with new photo records. (i don’t think it has to be that way, but that’s the way it worked the last time i checked.) i’m not sure about what happens in the other apps.
This is a duplicated shell record (by using duplicate option on iNat) from hermit crab observation - and there is no assosciation here anywhere unless user explicitly mentions or adds fields:
One temporary solution could be to use the API to automatically find observations sharing photos and then appending the corresponding ids to some specified observation field for the relevant observations. The API is described in detail at https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/ and I don’t think it should be too hard to “vibe code” such an application in python
If the photos are similar but not duplicated by iNaturalist (i.e., they have different ids but are exact copies), we will have to add perceptual hashing or another algorithm to find duplicates (and preferably caching since we then need the actual image data), and then use these to automatically populate a specified observation field