Many users post multiple photos of the same organism as separate observations. It’s a common issue with camera traps that take multiple images on a single trigger, but it’s also frequent with regular photo uploads too. Can iNat offer a way to group photos based on timestamp when uploading new observations? The most basic algorithm would be something like “all photos taken within 1 minute belong to a single observation”, but maybe the time frame could be adjustable? Obviously the user could manually move the photos around after the algorithm runs.
I’ve been wanting to start using camera traps, but haven’t had the time, yet. This is a little curious to me. I figured manually work the items of concern, not only to sort it out, but to apply a little human-powered quality control.
When I take pictures of animals, I usually end up taking a dozen but only posting the most useful handful. I figured it would be the same for a camera trap. Same for deployment, that each time I visit the site to swap cards, each card would be a “batch” that could share the same location data. How long do these operations actually take? Long enough for a feature request, at least.
These are two different feature requests, so you might consider separating them into their own threads so people can vote on them separately. Here, I fully support better tools for merging and splitting observations, but I don’t love the idea of system-level support for metadata that only pertains to one kind of observational practice, e.g. camera trapping. That’s what observation fields are for.
I don’t love using observation fields for the purpose of keeping track of metadata. I’m really thinking about a way to keep track of deployments independent of the photos recorded in the deployment.
At any rate, I took that part out of the request, now it’s just for a group-by-timestamp algorithm.
This is essentially what I do in my own observation database program when importing new photographs and it works really great. I almost never use the iNat web import so I can’t comment on how that works, but I can agree that this feature is extremely useful - not only for camera trapping, but in general.
PS.
Don’t do “new observation after 2 minutes”, but instead do “new observation after a 2 minute gap of inactivity”.
If we are talking about uploads through the website upload page, then I really don’t want something to change the order of the photos that I drag across. I carefully select the order I want to present the photos in the observation and upload them in that order. It would be counter productive to have them re-ordered.
