Exhibit Kiosk Mode for iNaturalist?

Hello!

[Please redirect me elsewhere if I am posting this in the wrong place]
I am looking into the option of using iNaturalist in a Museum Exhibit about Earth Day.
This would be displayed on a large touch screen and run off of a PC computer (browser?).

We would like to somehow eliminate all possibilities for visitors to click on links that would lead them outside of the iNaturalist site, or to enter their email to sign in/etc.
We would like it to start off in the view of a specific region and project, so that visitors can explore the map, and click on specific images.

I do not have much experience with altering code for these types of things so it may be outside of our capability, but open to suggestions or referrals!

Thank you

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Hi, and welcome to the Fourm! I would contact site staff directly at help@inaturalist.org.

Having implemented a couple of kiosks in the past, there are three parts to this:

  1. You need to load a Windows extension that will block the ability to switch applications or reboot the system without a password.
  2. You need to use a web browser in kiosk mode which disables the ability to type in URLs, use bookmarks, and a few other things. Most browsers can be run this way.
  3. The website itself must not have any links outside the site. This is what you are asking for here, and would require help from iNat developers.

The last time I did this, it was a simple site where it didn’t matter what page a user left showing. In the case of iNat, you probably want something that notices when it has been left idle for more than a couple of minutes, and then opens your “home” page, showing what you want viewers to start with.

If you have covered everything else mentioned here, you may decide that it is OK if a user follows a link to Wikipedia reading about a creature, or whatever other links exist off of iNat. Once the kiosk has been left idle for a minute, it will return to your starting page.

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I raised it as a possibilty here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/any-thoughts-for-inat-staff/164/9

and there have been a few people developing things like ID tools, so I would think it is very possible!

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to do it right, i think you’d either have to build your own app or page.

if you’re not willing to code and if your set of observations isn’t changing, you could probably use something like ArcGIS Online + StoryMaps to give you a relatively easy-to-setup and good-looking map-based interface to display those observations. you’d have to download your observation set from iNaturalist including image URL, maybe modify the list to reference a higher-quality version of the image URL, load into an ArcGIS map, configure pop-ups to show the data and images from your observations, and then maybe put everything into a StoryMap. you could probably also get the region place kml from iNaturalist and add that to the ArcGIS map, too.

here’s an example of a StoryMap that gives you a lot of narrative, plus an explorable / clickable map about halfway in: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/061eae64e075465b909fd094a8a0e811.

here’s an example of how you could set up pop-ups in your ArcGIS map with photos: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/mapping/configure-pop-ups-custom-attribute-display/.

ArcGIS maps don’t always handle a whole lot of observations very gracefully. so it may not be a good option if you’ve got a lot of observations to display.

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