This can be fairly useful if e.g iNat applied the wrong name of something nearby, the names applying to an area have been inconsistently formatted, or if you just want to rename locations of all the observations to be more precise (e.g name of a park, not just the town the park is in).
-
If using a Place (place you can search for under the “Filters” location box), skip to 2.
If using a boundary circle/box: Select your observations to be renamed in “My Observations”. Make sure you aren’t filtering out some of your observations (if you’re on “Your Observations”, it shouldn’t be). Let’s take these observations in the image below: this area is called “Crayford”, but iNat’s auto-naming called it “Dartford”, which is the next town over - they’re conjoined, so fair enough. Select them with your custom boundary:
Copy everything in the URL after and including the question mark:
Note you can filter by both place and drawn boundary box at the same time (see the end of this post). -
Go to the “Edit Observations” page (it’s the one you land on after using “Upload”). What now differs depending on which way you’re using:
If using a Place: Open the “Search” tab and fill in the dropdown under “Place”. You can ignore the SW Lat, SW Lon. etc. Make sure you have the filters at the top checked to not exclude any observations:
Hit search, and the observations in that Place will appear. Check they’re right:
If using a boundary circle/box: paste the half of the URL you just copied onto the end of the URL. We now see the observations we just selected:
And in the “Search”, we can see the tricky co-ordinates have been filled in for us:
-
Hit “Batch Edit”, “Select All”, then “Edit Selected”:
-
In the yellow “Batch Operations” box, type the name of what you want the location of all the selected observations to be called in the rightmost box:
Do not click the “edit” button under the globe (those are for filling in the location data!), then hit apply. All the observations selected now show the name I want them to have, rather than the ones iNat gave them by default:
-
Scroll right down to the bottom and hit “Save All”:
And now all our observations in the park are consistently named after the park as I told it to, rather than appearing as either “Richmond, UK”, “Greater London, UK” or “Richmond-upon-Thames, London, UK”:
Or for the Box-drawn one, they’ll now show Crayford:
Filtering by both:
You can filter by both a custom boundary and by Place. This can sometimes be useful for awkward boundaries. Let’s take this little peninsula of the Thames. South of the river, it’s the suburb of Kew, and in the borough of Richmond. North of the river, it’s Chiswick or Brentford, and in Hounslow. There’s no way I could select only the Kew ones with a square or circle:
But I can use the “Place” search or “Not in place” (or both at once) to filter out those in Hounslow, north of the river, and then select only the Kew ones:
From there, it’s the same - Batch edit, select all, edit selected, apply name, save. If you’re confident using Search URLs, you can include/exclude multiple Places at once - this can be useful for very awkward areas!