Description of need:
The ability to edit the location text without bringing up a map every time.
Feature request details:
If your photos are already geotagged, you don’t need a GUI to place them on a map. But you might want to provide more info than whatever text iNaturalist automatically places in the “location” box under an uploaded photo. (The guessed location is usually very broad, and sometimes a bit silly.) Here’s an example, where iNat has given me “Inyo County, CA, USA” as the location:
I almost always want to add more detail. In this case, I want to put "Mazourka Canyon, " in front of “Inyo County.” When I click in the box, a huge map comes up, and then I have to click again in the text box below the map. But I don’t need a map, I just need the text box!
This isn’t a big deal with single observations, but when I upload a lot of them with different locations, it gets to be a drag. And sometimes when I return from the map screen, the text I entered has been scrolled out of sight to the left, and I can’t check on it without bringing up the map again:
So what I’d really like is a way to edit the location text without bringing up the map every time. I expect the little “pin” icon to show me a map, but not the text box. Maybe this could be a user preference?
I can understand the use case, but I think that most users are probably looking for the full location edit capabilities/screen when they click on the location. Only having that available by clicking on the little image of the pin/marker would be restrictive to me (I wouldn’t guess that it would be different than clicking on the text myself). I think the cost here would outweigh the benefit, though if there were a different way to access the text only, that might be better.
Yeah, I get that. I think in a perfect world, it would be something you could choose in Settings: “clicking in location text brings up a map” would be the default, but it could be disabled.
There is already a similar request by me for the edit page. Bringing up the map in every edit isn’t a usefull feature. In a percentage of edits this results in data corruption, as it is all to easy to involuntarily touch the map and change location data without even noticing.
We can edit the location text, and should, since Google’s default is often UNhelpful. Too broad or flat out wrong. Notes is for info about habitat, or info not visibly captured in picture or audio.
There’s a simple work-around for this: if the location-box already has the keyboard focus, you can simply press the Home key to go straight to the beginning of the text. If the box doesn’t currently have the focus, you can click on the notes-box below it, and then back-tab to restore the keyboard focus (which will prevent the map dialog being shown again). In general, once an edit-box has the keyboard focus, you can use any of the standard navigation keys to move the caret around in it (usually indicated by a vertical bar |).
Really, the existing location-box should provide this. The two other boxes above it allow editing, so it would be much better if they all worked in a similar way. At the very least, it should be possible to paste the location notes into that box using the context menu. Weirdly, the current context menu already has a paste option, but frustratingly it does nothing when I try it in my Firefox browser. If pasting worked, this would open up the possibility of composing the location notes in the notes-box below, so it could be cut-and-pasted into the location-box later.
However, ideally, the location-box should be a fully editable field that wraps the text in the same way that the notes-box does. Editing that text should only change the location notes, and have no effect on any of the other location details.
