Bug or feature: Filename to species mapping failed

Bug Reports
1

A user uploaded an image file which had the species name as filename, but he got the genus typed wrong by missing an “i”. As a result, a totally different species appeared on the observation: a plant instead of a dragon fly.

I could reproduce that using the web site with Firefox on Windows:
if I name the file “Bracydiplax farinosa.jpg” instead of “Brachydiplax farinosa.jpg” (in this case, missing an “h”, did not test with the “i”), the result is “Paederia farinosa”. I.e. the “farinosa” part was right, but the genus totally wrong.

See also the discussion on the observation
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132143548

Could there be some hints to the user that the match was not perfect?
Or could the algorithm be optimized to look for the best of potential matches (e.g. least number of differences in the name)?

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In this case, simply “Farinosa” had been added as a synonym for Paederia farinosa, which is incorrect, so I deleted it and this shouldn’t happen in the future with other files named with farinosa.

I’m not seeing a bug, but if you have suggestions for how a new feature would look you can submit it to the #feature-requests section following the template provided there.

image

2 Likes
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Thanks for the edit.
Now I get a “Farinosa”, and by clicking on it, a list with 6 different species, but not including the dragon fly.

Hm. I don’t know. I do not use this feature, I normally upload photos with their (camera) file names, and then have CV showing me a list of typically useful choices.