Ideas for a revamped Explore/Observations Search Page

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard people mention bookmarking before, but the problem is I don’t actually know how to do it. Do you think you could give me a short description?

This is not the case. Rather, they will not achieve research grade if the community ID is different from their ID. Frequently, these users will change their IDs based on what the community suggests, so adding IDs is definitely helpful. You may also be interested in this feature request:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/search-by-observation-taxon-or-community-taxon/3620

This is also not true. Needs ID also counts.
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(Not sure why there’s casual observations though.)

The San Diego County project excludes casual obs - regional organizers are given the option to choose whether or not to include them: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2021-san-diego-county?tab=about

Not sure why the Join project page for the main CNC project excludes casual, but it’s had other inaccurate/missing information before too (prob vestigial/unupdated from when Collection and Umbrella projects were added to the site).

@miramatt I think this filter would be way more useful on Identify than on Explore actually!

Similar to these other remarks above:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439/4
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439/35

Similar remark:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439/157

I would appreciate it a lot.

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When a user hovers over an image in grid view or list view, the contrast is lowered or something; the image becomes very washed-out. Clearly, the ostensible purpose of this visual feedback is to let the user know which image he’s hovering over. But it also clearly detracts from the usefulness of the image, especially in grid view, because when the image is all washed-out, it’s hard for the user to see the characteristics of the organism. So you’re basically forcing the user to either click the image or move the cursor away from it if he wants to see a clear image. If you really have to give the user some visual feedback (which I’m really not sure is necessary anyway), can you please make it something that doesn’t interfere with the image in any way?

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Grid view is not done to iding imo, so you need to click on image anyway.

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Do you mean you can’t give an ID in grid mode? I realize that. But I still want to be able to see the image clearly.

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I quite like the Explore and Observation pages. However, I would like to see a search option for Unknown. Currently, “Unknown” and “Life” are regarded as equivalents by iNat, so by searching Unknown, the site will return every observation submitted in your specified geographical range.

I would prefer to be able to identify or at least narrow down any observations currently listed as Unknown (no ID yet submitted), as oftentimes new users or novice naturalists don’t realize it helps to be as specific as they are able.

Welcome to the forum! Is this what you’re looking for?

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Yes, that’s exactly what I was looking for! Thanks! Maybe I should have done a bit more digging…

I would appreciate an option to display the Species tab - and I suppose this could also be extended to the Identifiers and Observers tabs - in reverse order. Currently I find the Life Lists quite confusing, so I prefer to use the Explore page, but it only displays species in order of most to least observed. I would prefer to be able to see them from least to most observed. It could also be useful to see users with only a few identifications or observations, although I realize this information can be found in other ways. An option to display species by Recently Added (aka new lifers; for individuals, places, or the site itself, depending on your search parameters), in both orders, would be perfect for me, but I’m not sure how many others use the Explore page this way.

Please add a filter for observations “Included in a traditional project”

This would be the same set of observations for which we currently get a notification saying “curators added some of your observations”

Projects tell me that a particular observation I’ve taken is useful to someone, which encourages me to make more. This is especially true for curated projects where someone had to specifically add my observation. Its also just really validating to see people get value out of my observations and I would love a quick summary of that.

I understand that this feature request resembles " Filter observations by project" however in that request they discussed “collection projects which automatically add all records which meet their criteria” whereas my request is specific to curated projects

You can filter observations for any project they’re in using a field in filters.

Yes but as far as I can tell you can’t use that to filter all curated projects meaning you have to remember what the specific projects are called to see which of your observations have been added to projects

Ah, so you need to find out all of the projects/observations at once, right? Maybe api can do that now.

Pagination instead of infinite scloring

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I realize this is probably not super useful to most people and it might require a significant change, but I think that being able to view multiple searches in one Explore “output” would be helpful to me.

For example, combining these two searches into one:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?q=pollinated&search_on=tags&user_id=thatcactusgirl&verifiable=any
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=pollinators&user_id=thatcactusgirl&verifiable=any
Obviously terms like “order_by=xxx” would apply to both included searches, so I could search by date observed with the observations intermixed.
This would allow me to view and sort my observations of pollinators and the plants that they’re pollinating. I can’t think of too many other uses for something like this, so just having it as a manual-url-editing-only option would be fine so that some “power users” could use it.

Another (perhaps more useful) suggestion I would like is to be able to search for multiple annotations in an “AND” manner instead of an “OR” manner.
For example, searching up Cicadas that are Nymphs and evidenced by the Organism is not possible right now. The closest we have is searching for cicadas that are alive, and searching for cicadas that are nymphs (seems like a minor difference, but this then also includes adult cicada organisms and nymph molts): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?term_id=1,22&term_value_id=5,24&taxon_id=50190

I think this could be achieved in a similar manner to what @jdmore suggested for places:

So having &term_id=1+22&term_value_id=5+24 designate the “AND” annotation searching.

(Maybe we can add this tool to the explore page (the software already exists on GitHub so hopefully it won’t be too hard)