Is there a way to bulk delete places?
Several months ago, I created a ton of places for a personal project. I don’t need them anymore, and it would be nice to be able to delete them all at once. I can always delete them one at a time if I’m OK with doing nothing else with my life for the next week, but that isn’t ideal :-P
It’s not possible to bulk delete places. Just as when you create a place, deleting a place triggers reindexing of observations, which burdens the iNat infrastructure, so it might actually be best if you don’t delete them quickly.
Tony, can you offer any general perspective on best course of action regarding no longer needed places? Does short term reindexing load offset any value in small long-term reductions in number of places, or does it definitely make sense to get rid of as many unneeded places as possible in the long run? (I guess I’m really asking “What’s the ROI from deleting places?”)
My (non-dev) understanding is that there is a large “cost” for creating a place, editing a place’s boundary, or deleting a place because it triggers a lot of reindexing, especially if there are a lot of observations in that place. Outside of that, there is a continuing smaller cost for each place on iNat. As to whether it’s worth the cost of deletion to remove a place, I think it depends a lot on how many observations are in it.
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