About a year ago I started uploading more observations to iNat. Most are around my home and it wasn’t until recently that I realized I’d made the circle too large: some of the individual observations actually show up on a neighbor’s property. And while that may seem common in an urbanized area, my neighborhood is zoned as 5-acre minimum. Is there a way to downsize the circle for better accuracy and then do some kind of batch edit to correct those particular observations? There’s probably about 275, so not a completely unwieldy number, I hope.
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hello! while i am unsure about your question, i just wanted to let you know that by making your observations this accurate, you’re making it very easy to find your home address. even though i don’t have bad intentions, others might have, and they’ll be able to use that information to threat your safety. you don’t really have to make an observation’s location more accurate than city or neighborhood to ID an animal/plant, so i would recommend using ‘hidden’ mode when uploading from home (i don’t know how it is translated in english, but it basically shifts your location by a bit thus making it more private, yet accurate enough to be used for IDing)
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You can certainly edit the pinned location to be smaller, but this won’t affect past observations.
I’m unclear about what you mean when you say:
All the observations that use a pinned location should have the same location center/pin point, which is presumably on your property.
Maybe you can post links to a few of the observations you are having issues with as examples?
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It is your choice - for obs around my home I used a pinned location for my suburb. But others do use their actual home address.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephant-s-eye-on-false-bay
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You can’t use a pinned location in batch edit, and you can’t edit a pinned location. You’ll have to delete the pinned location and make a new one.
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To quickly “downsize” a pinned location, just
- select it for use in an observation (so that the pin and circle show)
- adjust the pinned location as desired (accuracy circle, etc.)
- delete the original pinned location (click on the “x” in the drop down and then “yes” when iNat asks “Are you sure?”)
- pin the current location that you just created above
Takes about 5 sec - so quick, my brain called it “editing” when it definitely is just deleting and readding, lol.
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- select it for use in an observation (so that the pin and circle show)
- adjust the pinned location as desired (accuracy circle, etc.)
- rename the location with a different name
- delete the original pinned location (click on the “x” in the drop down and then “yes” when iNat asks “Are you sure?”)
- pin the current location that you just created above
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is not required if users delete the original pinned location before pinning as in
though users can of course do this if they choose.
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I did the same thing at first. I used ‘batch edit’ to go back and change a large group of observations at once. Without changing the location itself, you can reduce the size of the circle by changing the accuracy [ Acc (m) ].
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Hey Everyone:
I’m sorry I sort of abandoned the conversation. I went out of town, came back to a mad week of garden prep and planting and now going out of town again. I will read your advice in depth next week. Thank you!
~ Lisa
Welcome, vul! I appreciate your concerns, however I live in a very safe area where I know virtually all my neighbors (there aren’t that many since we all live on 5 acres and much of the area is undeveloped). The main reason that I pinpoint my yard is because I want to document what I have here. Also, most of my observations are of species common to the area so I’m not worried about people coming here uninvited to see something special. On the rare occasions when I did find something nearby that I thought might be unusual, I obscured the location.
If I delete the original pinned location, will it disappear from ALL the earlier observations that used that one?
No. I’ve edited (by selecting, deleting, and readding) and my original locations did not change. I think the pinned location essentially works like an autofill - adding the saved fields (gps, accuracy) to the observations it is applied to.
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