I want to be able to see which of my observations are being used in projects quickly and easily. This could be good for finding specific projects that would be interested in my photos. Right now, there’s not an option to filter out observations that are not included in projects, so I have to pull up each observation individually to see which ones are being used. It’d be good to create a search filter that allows you to filter by specific projects or to exclude observations that are not included in any projects.
You actually can do most of this, although I don’t know how to search for observations not in any projects at all, although with so many projects these days I suspect there are few of those. Unfortunately the search parameters are not on the filters form, like many others (There are almost 40 search parameters, the form can’t hold them all).
You do need to know the ID number of the relevant project, to get that go to its page and add .json to the URL, it is the 1st thing there called ID.
There are 2 separate searches
1 project_Id finds records in a project https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=cmcheatle&verifiable=any&project_id=10522
2 not_in_project finds records not in a specified project https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=cmcheatle&verifiable=any&taxon_id=447155¬_in_project=10522
Note there are 2 more projects searches but I’ve not listed them here as they either don’t work as expected or I don’t understand how they are supposed to work
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It should also be noted that most projects are collection projects which automatically add all records which meet their criteria. You just don’t see the project badge on your observation unless you formally join the project.
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Thanks for the replies, that’s good to know, and that does help with finding some of the information I’m looking for. However, it might be good to also have the more generalized option of filtering for observations ‘included in any project’ or ‘not included in any project’. Needing to look up individual project numbers to search by does make it difficult to do the sort of quick searching I’m thinking of when I’m looking for more aggregate information like ‘which of my observations are included in the most projects?’ or something like that.
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I’m not sure how easy this would be to do technically. Most projects these days are collection projects. Observations do not “belong to them” as these projects are effectively saved searches that run when a user requests to interact with it.
To calculate every project that an observation could qualify could in reality mean dozens or hundreds even of projects, and I suspect it would be computationally very expensive to search every project to determine which ones something meets the criteria for.
To put in perspective, I don’t know how many are currently active, but just under 75000 projects have been created on the site. To dynamically figure out which of my 27000+ observations belongs to the most number of those 75000 projects is not a minor calculation.
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This isn’t something we’re going to move forward with so I’m going to close the request.