No, but it was mentioned somewhere on the forum that there’s a native app on some phones that does that.
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Might be a feature that is associated with transfers of photos from Flickr to iNat. Most of my old pics are on Flickr.
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Sure it could be resolved, but most people wouldn’t know how to get it resolved and it would take curator time to resolve it. For that reason I’d prefer a DQA line over a flag, if anything. Although to be honest duplicates don’t bother me at all and I’ve never felt the need to do anything about them.
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Yes, it is. I’ve seen that alert when importing photos from Flickr that I had already uploaded.
Edited to add a link to another feature request mentioning this.
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I agree with @fffffffff that there’s more than 1 type of duplicate observation… and while you may only get flags for the duplicate PHOTO type (IDed as same organism), other curators may also see flags for both types/definitions.
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This really would solve every problem about this. Adding another Data Quality Assessment of something like “Is this a duplicate of other observation?” with a short explanation of what duplicate means would fix this issue.
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DQA vote was requested for a long time, it seems staff is more into a flag than it, though I’m all for it.
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I think iNat is against deleting anything without user’s will, of course if I would decide I would like to see duplicates deleted as well as fully blank records, I would like to see number of observations being true and now it seems it’s just a way to get them higher.
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When I asked to offer an annotation for both sexes or for multiple species, I was told to just duplicate the observation with a different ID or annotation
Now they’re requesting for such a thing to be flagged and removed?
No, different specimens are not duplicates.
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Let’s say that I took a photograph of two plovers and a curlew, so I uploaded the plover’s observation twice, once for the male and one for the female and then I uploaded the same observation, for the curlew. Would that not be seen as flaggable by him? I also saw another observation posted multiple times as it was a basket of different fish species
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Each specimen by default should be in a different observation, it doesn’t always happen, but that’s how iNat expects users to upload, in all cases with multiple specimens/species observer for clarity it’s better to write in the description which specimen is ided (or add markers to the photo), there’s no duplication in what you described.
Duplicate is either you take one pic of one gull you photographed, and upload it 10 times, iding as gull, or not iding at all, or you take 10 pics of that one gull, all one by one as it’s standing, walking, flying, and upload them all separately, that would be a duplicate too, though this request is sadly only about first case - 1 photo duplicated.
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I see, that can be a problem especially that there’s already a feature allowing several images of the same specimen in the observation
I am relating it to what I’ve been told when I requested ID for more than one species or if both genders were present in the observation, which is why I see it not being a good feature if I were for example to post several same observations because there were different species in the photo
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That’s a different type of duplicate, you describe what can be done with a special button, so your valid observations shouldn’t be affected by all of this, different species can’t be duplicates in a “unwanted” sense.
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I see
I once trawled through maybe ten pages or more of old unknowns from a certain country where a certain user had posted every image separately in their early days on iNat - there were frequently 15-20 observations of the same individual with one photo each, and went on for pages and pages. I left a few comments on a few observations in the hope that they would notice and perhaps deal with the lot.
One of the other potential problems with ‘different-photo-duplicates’ is that sometimes, although the collection is enough to ID the organism, no single photo is, so it actually hinders ID.
In an amazingly ideal world, the flag would prompt the flagger to enter the urls of the observations that are supposedly duplicates, then automatically flag all but one of them to make them casual, and send a message to the user saying something like ‘Another user has suggested that the following observations may represent a single encounter with an organism, here is a link for how to merge them. If they really are separate observations, click this link.’ and then if they click something ‘iNat’ either resolves the flag - or posts a message on the flag so that a curator can close it.
Or something along those lines.
This would make me happy :-)
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So what is the current recommended procedure for duplicates? I hate to flood the flag backlog for junk like this (and how are curators even going to resolve them?), but there’s also been a lot of pushback here in the forum lately about using existing DQA categories to deep-six duplicates. Duplicates are a waste of my time as an identifier and they make pseudoreplication in the data. (And yes, downstream users (like GBIF-harvesters) ought to be checking the quality of their input data, but if we can control a given problem here at the source, why not?)
I just came across a user who repeatedly submits pairs of some robber fly photo weeks apart. Sometimes it’s literally the exact same photo, sometimes it’s a slightly different crop or slightly brightened. They’re always singleton subjects, so you can’t use the “they’re trying to record multiple individuals of a flock” argument; I’d guess they’re doing it so they can see if they end up with a different ID the second time. We have tried to write comments over the years saying such-and-such is a duplicate and to please remove, but no response.
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Deliberately wasting the skill and goodwill of identifiers would be a case for help at iNat to intervene.
I leave a note in a comment. Add no ID. Unfollow if someone does add an ID.
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instead of a new DQA flag, i think this should be added as a new type of “recommend action” activity that would show up in the timeline alongside identifications and comments.
possible recommended actions could be “merge into [suggested obs id]”, “delete duplicate of [obs id]”, “carve [sounds/photo(s)] off as [taxon]”, and “duplicate [sound(s)/photos(s)] as [taxon]”. these could be initiated either by the observer or by others. a recommended action should show as either proposed, rejected, accepted as is, or accepted with modifications.
if accepted, here’s what the effect of the actions should be:
| action | source observation | associated observation |
|---|---|---|
| merge into | delete upon merge | add note to indicate that a merge occurred on date |
| delete dupe | delete | N/A |
| carve off | add note/link to indicate photos moved to [obs id] | add note to indicate that observation was created from action on [obs id] |
| duplicate as | add note/link to indicate observation duplicated as [obs id] | add note/link to indicate that observation was duplicated from [obs id] |
finally, allow filtering of observations by new parameters &without_/action_pending=[merge,delete,carve,etc.]
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Upload ONCE
DUPLICATE three times.
Results:
Press 'i ’
There seem two meanings for one word “Duplicating”
In the good old days you could easy link the observations with an observation field like Linked, reference url with would copied also. Nowadays the urls stay behind.