Have a time shift feature available for search URLs (or in search menu)

Could there be a search URL feature which would allow to search a specific date from noon to noon the following day?

I refer to night observations as typically done by moth observations (Lepidoptera). For more than a century the convention was that the time past midnight “belongs” to the date before. This makes a lot of sense, because a night is an entity, starting one day at dusk and ending the following day at dawn. Moth behaviour at the light is often such that they come and sit still for the rest of the night. If I observe moth on consecutive days, the ones observed between midnight and 5am have nothing in common with the ones observed from 9pm to midnight. I guess you see my point?

Technically speaking, the problem could be solved by (1) a feature which shifts every observation date/time by 12 hours or (2) by introducing a search feature for a single night (as opposed to a single day) which allows to get all observations between noon of the specified date and noon of the following day.

This would help me a lot to align observation records from my diaries, moth collection (both using the abve time convention) and photographs (exact time). Thank you.

one thing that might be challenging is specifying the time zone. From what I can tell, observations are tied to the time zone on the creating platform which doesn’t need to match the timezone where the thing was observed. Also, there’s not currently a time required for an observation so you’d probably miss a lot of the target observations. You could search for consecutive days in the URLs though just setting the d1 and d2 (d1=2019-10-1& d2=2019-10-2)

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Including the time in the d1 and d2 parameters seems to work: d1=2020-09-19T12:00:00
eg:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?place_id=any&d1=2020-09-19T12:00:00&d2=2020-09-20T11:59:59&user_id=amzamz&taxon_id=47157

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…the “d1 and d2 trick” doesn’t work, if you have observations in consecutive nights. It will then combine moths seen after midnight in one night with the ones from before midnight of the following night. This wold be completely wrong I a afraid…

That’s why you would use the d1=YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS format, but I’m not sure from looking that the T flag works here. The HH:MM:SS would let you specify the time bounds, but I think the d1 only accepts YYYY-MM-DD not with the added T, it doesn’t look like you can search by observation hour.

It seems like your feature request would make more sense to request that d1 & d2 be expanded to include time stamp searches, because it’s a more general use case you could consider.

But I think this gets back to some of the time zone issues… looking back at my one photos, some are missing time stamps and a lot seem to be based on the time zone of my phone regardless of the time zone of the observation.