Is there a bookmark function on iNaturalist (not external)? I’ve read that the ‘favorite’ button shouldn’t be used for bookmarking, so I was wondering why there isn’t a dedicated bookmark option or at least a search function within favorites. That would be very useful for navigation.
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To my knowledge, no. You could physically bookmark the link perhaps? I usually use the favourite function or just add an identification to keep my tabs on a particular observation. Might be a possible suggestion to make under the Feature Requests tab.
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It’s been requested before but I don’t think it’s something we’d likely build as there are various bookmark extensions available.
Which ones are available, for example? I’d love to have something similar to how the ‘favorite’ feature looks right now. Also, why isn’t there a search bar for ‘favorites’? That seems like it would be quite simple to implement, no?
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I don’t use one, but here’s a list of 20 bookmarking extensions (although I know Pocket is going out of business).
The “favorite” feature was never designed as a bookmarking function but a way for people to just mark something as their favorite (for whatever reason) and maybe give the observer some encouragement.
I’m not an engineer so I don’t really know. But there’s always limited engineering time and I suspect that whatever resources could be spent making a search functionality for faves would be low priority.
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you could create a traditional project to hold observations of interest, although not everyone allows other folks to add their observations to traditional projects.
if you want to search through your favorites, this describes a couple of ways to bring favorited observations into the Expore (or Identify) web screen: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-bring-your-favorites-into-the-explore-tab/52605. (the bottom of this post describes how i would implement this sort of functionality in the system: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-search-feature-in-favorites/2502/19 .)
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Yes, sadly, many observations aren’t allowed to be added to project, hence my question on this topic. Thank you for your tips though!
Thank you for your help! :)
You can ask the observer to add it themselves or save the links on project journal.
Is there a reason not to use favourites as bookmarks?
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There’s a difference between stuff i favourite because it’s just absurdly pretty, stuff i favourite because it has information in it i want to save, stuff i favourite because it’s a very detailed observation, stuff i favourite because I want to look at it again later, stuff i favourite due to the engagement it had, and stuff i favourite because I want to know what it is. They all go in the same pile though
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If I sort my own observations by number of faves, about half of the top ones are unidentified fish bones because 3-4 different fish bone identifiers all use the feature for bookmarking to return to later. 
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And when (if?) they come back and do that, do they then unfave them (since they no longer need them bookmarked)?
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So far it seems like very much an “if” situation…
But do they want the reference? After all if they do manage to identify the difficult bones surely they don’t want to immediately lose that effort in the pile of easily identified bones!
I use the favourites as bookmark, for all the reasons listed above.
The laptop owner does not allow extensions.
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