I was going thru observations of blow-flies yesterday and found that about 1/2 were blurry observations that had no hope of ID past the already-given family or genus IDs. As the top blow-fly IDer on iNaturalist, I can say that with confidence.
Ideally, I would mark “No” for “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” so that the next person who goes thru these doesn’t have to deal with all of these observations still in Needs ID. However, it would at least double the time it takes me to go thru observations if I did this, because I have to switch tabs and manually select this option with the mouse. Is there a faster way to do this, or has something been proposed? Perhaps main page of the Identify window with a keystroke? I ask this because this is a major impediment to ever fully curating blow-flies and other groups dominated by blurry photos.
though it’d probably be likely to be accidentally triggered, and I’m not sure if it’s good design practice to allow things to be “toggled” without visually seeing it happen? but that’s probably better discussed over at the feature request than here.
You can also currently do SHIFT→→→ to at least get over to that tab without clicking
When I have a subset of things I know I want to mark with the same DQA, I do it like this: ID or review all the other things on the page that are between them, then refresh the page to tighten the subset into a sequence together on the page. Then go forward on ID tab through the set, and then switch to the DQA tab and go backward through the set (or vice versa).
As a totally new person to this service (and with some previous experience of building services like this) I found that “needs ID” part is underdeveloped and community moderation features need to be improved. When I started browsing “needs ID” records around me most of them were stale, blurry or just spammy. On Android device I found no way to “report” or mark them for deletion.
What you are seeing are the blurry photos that remain after others have passed through, the very ones referred to by edanko.
Identification is really much better done on the website than the app, easier to see details and infformation. I think of the app as a tool for making observations, and do everything else on the full flavour website.
Make sure to mark those photos as cannot be improved, and once they get two IDs they fall out of the Needs ID pool. Just be sure it really is not identifiable, you’d be surprised what people are capable of!