Embed Observations in Project Journal

Feature Requests
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1

It would be nice to have the possibility to add observations collected by a project to a journal post of the same project.

With that feature an admin could:

  • Feature an observation of the month from project members
  • Highlight some observations of an event based project like a Bioblitz
  • and the like ;)

Since this functionality already exists for personal journals the effort of implementation should be viable.

Thanks!

2

Iā€™ll offer a slightly more complicated perspective on present capabilities: Observations can be ā€œassociatedā€ with a personal journal post, and they are displayed at the bottom of a post. But at this time, hotlinks to observations cannot be embedded directly into the body of a post. Single images from ā€œinaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photosā€ can be embedded in a journal post, but they are not hot-linked to the observation.
There has been a long-standing feature request to streamline this complexity by allowing your concept of direct links within a journal post to an observation. I donā€™t know the current status of that request.

Hereā€™s a recent example of a journal post with a static amazonaws image embedded in the post: https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/89081-take-good-notes
Youā€™ll notice in the above example that I actually added an explicit link to the observation just above the static image. In your scenario, that wouldnā€™t be necessary.
And here are a couple of examples with observations ā€œassociatedā€ with a journal post:
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/78109-cross-post-a-newly-identified-texas-endemic-pyralid
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/69457-biovac

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3

Actually, it is possible to include a ā€˜clickableā€™ photo into the journal post, with a HTML code - combination of a href and img src.

E.g. the photo in the notes of this observation of a caterpillar is a link to the observation of the adult moth: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/187952002

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4

This would be very useful; Iā€™d be interested in seeing the syntax for such a combination. Could you please spell that out here?

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5

html:
<a href="https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/195491116"><img src="https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/343927464/original.jpg" alt="optional alt text"></a>

markdown:
[![optional alt text](https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/343927464/original.jpg)](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/195491116)

mix:
[<img src="https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/343927464/original.jpg" alt="optional alt text">](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/195491116)

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6

Chiming in here to note this is a great idea. Iā€™d like to add a couple of additional comments/feature requests related to journal entries in general. I realize some of these may be impractical, but one can dream!

  1. In a personal journal entry, I can link an observation from a list of recent ones, but I have to scroll through that list. Sometimes I am looking for an older obs. It would be nice to have a search function.
  2. I appreciate the posting of the html code, etc. to generate thumbnail images. My experience with that sort of thing in comments is that the URLā€™s are not persistent. Iā€™m not sure if the same is true in journal entries. BugGuide has a cute feature to implement this function. One inserts a bit of markdown (BBCode) with the node number of the image in this format: ā€œ[thumb:12345]ā€ to generate a clickable thumbnail to the image with node number 12345. (BugGuide organizes everything as Drupal nodes. Each image has a node, as well as each guide page. Then relationships are defined among the nodes, such as taxonomy or linked images. A set of linked images is similar to a single iNaturalist observation. I donā€™t think this would translate directly to the iNaturalist organization, but the functionality is nice. Perhaps it can be replicated in a different way?)
  3. It would be really nice to be able to include links to multiple images and/or observations in the same journal entry. I guess it can be done with the code discussed above, but I am not sure about the URL persistence issues. Perhaps there is no problem in journal entries as there appears to be in comments. I will experiment.

Again, great topic. All this is related, functionally, to the widespread desire for a user-generated wiki. A journal entry is similar to a wiki entry, but does not have the multi-user access.

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7

I wrote a journal post about adding images and audio to journal posts and comments here - Adding images and audio to posts - it does not include links to the images or observations, but you can use @pisum ā€˜s code above.

If you want to add a selection of observations from a project, place or person to a post, then you can use @glauber735 ā€˜s awesome widget found here - Widget Builder .

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8

Thanks, that is a helpful resource. Edit. In comments on observations, (end edit) when I have used these direct links to images on amazon web services in the past, the links have worked initially, then broken after an interval. Perhaps that is no longer an issue. It seems yours in the journal entry continue to work, so maybe it was just their use in the comments that failed, or some issue with aws in the interval. Will try again.