With a very old version of the iphone app circa 2011-2012, the map would keep pins on it for every observation you made that you haven’t uploaded yet. I found this very useful in terms of the ‘pacman trail’ seeing which areas I have been to when I am doing a bioblitz or inventory type survey. It worked without cell service too (though the air photos wouldn’t if they weren’t cached). For me it is not an option to upload things in the field, and the map of uploaded observatons is very slow and doesn’t show everything. So i’d love to have the un-uploaded observations pins back.
I don’t personally feel like I need this, but IMO the better scope of work would be
A map view of “My Observations” that is separate from Explore
Display coordinates for any observations cached in the app, using different symbology for uploaded and not-uploaded observations
(challenging bonus) Offline map tiles
For the record, we’ll probably never have an offline map that shows everything if everything means all your observations. Charlie, you and I both have 30k+ obs, and while it’s not crazy to just cache coordinates for all those obs, it is a little crazy to cache enough of that data to show a map and be able to tap on map markers to see details (i.e. caching all the relevant obs data, not just the coordinates).
Oh i’m definitely not wanting to cache all my observations. :) I just mean the ones still only on the phone. As everyone knows i don’t use auto upload, so my day in the field would all be there to see and make plans based upon. I know it may be a nche thing which is part of why i am throwing it out now that i can vote. If no one else cares, obviously it’s not worth dev time…
I actually wish the app wouldn’t sync so much uploaded stuff (at least photos) but that’s another topic. Other than that yeah your scope looks like what i was thinking. We will see if anyone votes for it :)
I would use this feature. I primarily use the iphone app and upload each ob separately. This would be useful when out in the field but probably for different reasons than Charlie’s, or not. My memory is very visually-oriented.
Since only Mira and I have interest in this after six days on the list, we can probably call it a niche thing and lock it i guess. Thanks for the consideration @kueda
I would love to see a little breadcrumbs trail of where I’ve walked as well as different little dots of unuploaded observations. It was also mentioned by another person on Twitter. It would be really cool to include this information in Trips: inaturalist.org/trips, and logging GPS continuously would make grabbing the location much faster for each observation.
Wow, interesting. Thanks for plugging trips. I will look into that. But, I have been thinking for a while about how GPS tracks would benefit iNat. Right now, my observations usually happen incidentally with my Strava activity, not for any related reason, but it could be interesting to see user’s observations grouped by trip. Once can often see the observations and extrapolate a user’s trip, but I see relevance at the intersection between adventure and discovery.
iNat isn’t an activity tracker, but it is social, and I often appreciate seeing the activity of the users as much as the details of the observations.
Call this comment a spur of this thread, but it’s been on my mind so I was interested to see it in a post.