Help! I was looking at arachnid observations - I was in Map view and typed Arachnida in the species box - and then scrolled down the observations in the box on the right hand side of the screen. At the bottom end of the box, i.e. the last observations, I noticed two identical observations, apparent duplicates (no other observations in the box were duplicated). I right-clicked on one of the “duplicates” to open in a new browser tab, then clicked Edit>Delete, thinking I was cleaning up a duplicate. But now it appears that both have been deleted. That observation is gone!
Thought: Maybe it was not a duplicate at all; perhaps there’s a bug in the system that showed me a single observation as if it was two separate observations?
Saludos, @adamwelz, I don’t know that you can get it back. I do not know of a solution other than to re-upload the photos and recreate the whole thing.
But rest assured you are not the only one who has tried to delete a doubled Obsv only to end up with 0. I have too!
Thank you @swampster I did not know that could happen. It also happens to me sometimes on uploading that it appears to create a double, perhaps because the connection here can be wonky.
I ran into this before, and deleted it! I ended up just uploading the image file (after scrolling through thousands of pictures on my external drive…) and making a new observation with the correct info.
I’ve gotten pretty close to making that mistake a few times now. Thankfully, I had the forethought to check the URL and I noticed that the observation number was the same.
Seems like a bug that should get fixed! Are you seeing this, iNat staff?
Even though I religiously file and keyword almost every photo I take, I can’t find the originals from the deleted obs. Can iNat backend people not find it somewhere on a server?
@adamwelz This may not be a glitch internal to iNat. For instance, on my Mac computers, using either the Chrome browser or Safari, pages of images of observations (e.g. in Explore or ID, and apparently in observation lists in the map view) occasionally (often?) have duplicated lines or individual observations–anywhere from 2 to 10 of them. It probably has something to do with call/retrieval mechanics of the browser and a given OS. iNat staff have been aware of this glitch for years but the solution is apparently not self-evident.
The (old) Android app also often shows an observation twice in its list, and in the beginning I sometimes deleted one of them - resulting in “both” being gone. By now I have just accepted that in the rare cases I really upload a duplicate I should leave it up to identifiers to notice and only after they tell me about I will delete
