I want to post observations that will show up when the town is searched, without identifying the exact location in the town. If I understand right, setting it to obscured will prevent it from showing up for the town. It seems like my best bet is to mark some location in the town and set the accuracy…

Hello @snake_doctor ! Welcome to the forum. The web uploader map does not display town borders because it uses a standard Google Maps API layer, which does not communicate with iNaturalist’s custom or community-curated boundary databases in real time. You could be having the issue because your bound…

Thanks for the welcome and help! Not to knock your help, but ouch that is clunky. I guess next I’ll be making a feature request. I should also mention that the way this system works, even if the bounds / bounding box were displayed, to make this work (have an observation show up for a town without…

It would be nice if there was an option “obscure to town-level specificity”. It’s been asked for before , but the idea was rejected: [image] Add option for smaller obscuring area I’m sorry, but after discussion we’ve decided we won’t provide smaller area options for obscuration.

Others could formulate what I am saying better than myself, but this is kind of like a yes-and-no situation. If you live near the edge of a town, drawing an accuracy circle that covers your actual location and stays inside the border is often mathematically impossible. I understand how that is anno…

Thanks zygy, that’s unfortunate. When I said I might make a feature request, I actually meant for showing the bounding box when selecting location. But as I noted, even that would be clunky and being able to obscure to a finer grained area (or at least index observations to a finer grained area lik…

[image] zygy: It’s been asked for before , but the idea was rejected: This is intriguing. I’m wondering if they considered discussing making some community-created places reviewable, with place reviewers for them. This would potentially help the other half of the problem. Obviously it is rathe…

Thanks @cs16-levi . So it’s not a distraction, I’ll clarify that my use case is not obscuring the location of my residence. (I’ll leave it to folks who have that use case to advocate for it). There are observations where I’m not willing to disclose the precise location to the whole internet, but I …

[image] snake_doctor: So it’s not a distraction, I’ll clarify that my use case is not obscuring the location of my residence. (I’ll leave it to folks who have that use case to advocate for it). To be clear, I did NOT mean geoprivacy obscured. I was referring to clicking on a relevant location…

Ok thank you. So just to sum up: the current system forces me to fudge the location of the pin and circle, and in some cases to put the real location adjacent to the circle rather than within it. And, to implement that compromise, I have to hunt for where to put the circle, because it doesn’t show …

[image] snake_doctor: That discussion was over 6 years ago, I wonder if it might be reconsidered now. Probably not. This would open up a pathway to game the system to reveal the locations of observation that are obscured. This raises both privacy issues and protection issues for species tha…

How do I keep accuracy circle within town's area / bounding box

General

zygy July 25, 2026, 11:14pm 4

It would be nice if there was an option “obscure to town-level specificity”.

It’s been asked for before, but the idea was rejected:

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How do I keep accuracy circle within town's area / bounding box

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