I’m switching from a Oneplus (android) to an iPhone and am finding iNaturalist genuinely hard to use now. I specifically downloaded iNaturalist classic because I didn’t like how regular IOS iNat tried to constantly separate my imported photos into individual observations when I’d take multiple pictures of the same organism. Here are my issues with IOS iNaturalist classic in order of how much they’re bothering me.
- No more pinned locations.
- No more in-app photo editing.
- Photos can’t be shared directly to the app via my gallery’s share button.
- No more being able to upload external audio files when making an observation with audio.
- No more side by side comparison between your photo and a suggested ID.
- No more being able to view the full taxonomy of a suggested species ID.
- No more being able to search through and sort your own observations or the observations of others either on a profile or on a map.
- No more being able to click onto your account or others via an observation.
I’ve spent years using the iNat UI that my old phone had, it was so quick and easy that I could upload an observation in less than a minute, and even then I could spend up to an hour doing so if I had a large backlog.
On android iNat app:
- Share the photo directly to the app
- Edit photo in the app
- Select the pinned location if needed
- Upload
on IOS iNat classic app:
- Edit photo in photo gallery
- Go to app and select it
- Manually move the location nearby to the pinned location
- Pick up my old phone and edit the observation to give it the pinned location.
- Upload
Those extra steps that iNat classic and my iPhone make me do add significant time and inconvinece to the process of uploading each and every observation. I know it doesn’t have to be this way either because android iNat exists.
Loosing the ability to access pinned locations is especially bad for me, because the majority of my observations are made close to my house and have been set as being anywhere in my town for privacy. Thousands of observations, all set to be the same coordinates, same accuracy, same place name. Is this nitpicking? Maybe, but there’s nothing that gets to me quite like a threat to the sanctity of my ability to have my photography be conveniently, consistently and securely stored. Is there any way that I can get back to some semblance of normalcy or will I have to put up with these hurdles for the foreseeable future?
There are two iNat apps on the iPhone.
iNat Classic, which you’re already familiar with and is essentially the old app.
iNat Next which is the new one and is more similar to the Android one you like better, although it’s not exactly the same.
You probably want the iNat Next one, although many of us prefer iNat Classic by a large degree.
Is it possible to do IDs on either iOS app? Even for my own few observations I just use the phone app to upload photos, I noticed that it doesn’t encourage you to write notes you have to click to get the comments window up which might explain why so many observations are just photos.
Even the most terse notes can be so valuable “after a rainstorm” or “huge colony” even “I was having lunch” can be useful!
I won’t say they should be mandatory, but I was disappointed that it was hidden.
Pinned locations are most useful for cameras that lack GPS. I don’t think pinned locations would be generally useful on iPhone since it can embed GPS coordinates directly into photo metadata. I don’t know about Android…was it not able to do that at one time? That would explain why the Android app supports pinned locations. In any case, I suspect most smartphone users would rather not think about location.
Your use case is a special case of obscured location. This has been discussed numerous times on the forum (with no good solution as I recall). Using a pinned location to override perfectly good GPS coordinates seems like a hack. There’s gotta be a better way.
My old phone also had the ability to embed locations into photos, it just had a harder time being accurate in more rural areas.
I see how that works now, thanks. It seems unnecessarily complicated in my opinion, but on the old iNat app you’d have had to close out the observation and start over making a new one for the separate organism/s, so maybe I’m biased on that.
I hadn’t tried making a species ID to someone else’s observation on the regular IOS iNat, but I can see that you can still make ID’s on iNat classic.
I redownloaded the regular IOS iNat and am finding it better now that I know how to group multiple photos into one observation. This version also brings back the ability to view the taxonomy of a suggested ID. However, I’m still having issues with it. Again, this version doesn’t have pinned locations, no in-app photo editing and no side by side comparison to a suggested ID. Moreover, it doesn’t seem like there’s any way that I can add an observation to a project on this version of the app which is very annoying because all of my UV light lure photos are added to the blacklight bugs project.
this functionality is already planned to be added