My request is to have the iNat algorithm generate an ID for observations marked “unknown” after a certain amount of time passes (could be a year, six months, or three months). This could be marked somehow as “iNat-generated ID” and would only to observations for which the iNat algorithm is “pretty s…

I would think, in lieu of a better system that displays placeholders, it would just skip observations with placeholder text.

Given the number of things in the “unknown” pile that are that way either because there are multiple photos attached of different organisms, or because it’s utterly unclear what the photographer was centered on, I think a fully automated approach is not a good way to go. It also seems a bit perilou…

[image] choess: What if Identify had a button that let you add the ML identification, but only to, say, Kingdom or Phylum level? That would still go faster than manually typing it out, but would keep a human in the loop to skip over fundamentally ambiguous observations. My problem with this i…

[image] choess: Given the number of things in the “unknown” pile that are that way either because there are multiple photos attached of different organisms, or because it’s utterly unclear what the photographer was centered on, I think a fully automated approach is not a good way to go. Obser…

[image] bouteloua: it would just skip observations with placeholder text and maybe skip observations with anything in the description section as well? [image] choess: It also seems a bit perilous to add ML identification access to the Identify tool what is “ML identification,” please? …

ML = “machine learning”, i.e., the AI, Ident-o-tron, or whatever our common jargon is supposed to be.

Just added ML, AI, and CV to the Glossary tutorial topic , all referring to iNaturalist’s Computer Vision system for automated ID suggestions. If someone can confirm that this has also been the common usage for “Ident-o-tron”, that would be a good glossary addition also!

Full disclosure, I didn’t read every post here, there seems to be a lot of this type of discussion lately. However, it looks like many people are discussing the details of how to implement such a feature, or whether it’s possible. I question the why. The mere existence of unidentified observation…

We are focused here on old observations that have never been identified and sunk to the bottom of the pile. I have spent a lot of time adding coarse ids to these in India especially. There aren’t hordes of people sorting them out, just a few that I’ve noticed with gratitude. & the reason for wanti…

The Ident-o-tron is not the same thing as computer vision. You used to be able to get to the Ident-o-tron from clicking Compare on an observation page (if I’m remembering correctly). Now, if you right-click Compare and open in new window, you’ll get to it. For example: https://www.inaturalist.org…

Automatic iNat suggestion for "unknown" observations that reach a certain age

Feature Requests

Topic		Replies	Views
Does anyone else get bothered by how many observations are marked as "unknown species"? General question	231	9451	December 27, 2022
Difficulties with Identifying General	21	1137	July 1, 2024
Can't find unidentified observations before 2020 General	33	708	May 9, 2024
Get ID to old observations General	31	1217	June 18, 2026
Thoughts on unknown ID level? General	59	1401	October 9, 2025

Automatic iNat suggestion for "unknown" observations that reach a certain age

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