Thanks
Please add a title attribute to the species name, so that when the whole name is not visible, you can hover over it to see it in full, rather than have to click on the link. As happens on the identify page (though that does not have text-overflow: ellipsis, which I find slightly strange).
8 Likes
Hi—I’m looking for information on sorting species in taxonomic order. Every other online bio-inventory service I’ve worked with has provided this option. It is highly valuable for example, when using online records/photos to study species that are similar to one another, which is one of the purposes for which I joined iNat. In 2019, you wrote that iNat planned to re-write the explore page. Has that happened? I believe that projects would also be more effective and valuable if they could display sightings in taxonomic order, instead of being ordered only by the number of sightings. I understand that sightings count is a much simpler search, but its not very useful for anyone who is using the data intensely/professionally. A massive vote here for implementing taxonomic sorts (at least for butterflies!).
Thank you!
Neil Bjorklund
www.butterfliesoforegon.com
2 Likes
Your question may be related to this feature request and/or this feature request may be completed with your question?
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/dynamic-life-list-add-taxonomic-sort-parameter-to-species-observation-list/37632
I agree that this kind of display option should be available wherever it makes sense in the website.
Allow upload of an image in ‘Explore’ to generate ID suggestions (image matching) - this feature available for members and non-members.
This would be a useful tool for non-members, encouraging them to use the site more often and become engaged (ie sign-up).
Given the length of this thread, I’d be surprised if this is a novel suggestion but, in any case:
It would often be helpful to more easily see the map through the observations. I have a tendency to just open iNaturalist, click “Explore”, and then zoom the map in to wherever I’m interested in.
In that particular case, I suppose the obvious answer is, “Well, don’t do that.” True, but I run into this issue in a variety of contexts and not all of them can be reduced to inefficiency on my part.
5 Likes
If the place names were in a layer on top of the red dots, until you zoom in - that would help.
1 Like
And the opacity of the red dots would better be reduced, so that the map can still be seen.
2 Likes
Thank you. I do know how to look at my life list in taxonomic order. What I’m after is the ability to use the taxonomic sort in a project display, in general search results, and in edit observations.
Cheers,
Neil
I want to thank everyone for all their thoughts. I wish it wasn’t the case, but rewriting the Explore page is still something that’s on the backburner, unfortunately. Keep the ideas coming, but I can’t provide an estimate as to when this will actually get underway and I wanted just make sure that’s clear.
5 Likes
A feature I would find useful: a button to take you from Explore to “Browse Photos” for your current set of observations.
Suppose you have a query in Explore, and you want to see the set of photos associated with those observations without clicking through observations one by one. It would be nice to have a button that takes you to the appropriate “Browse Photos” page.
I’m usually using Explore as my primary interface for iNaturalist, because various useful tools are only available there (e.g., drawing boxes on maps). Naturally, when I want to go to other parts of iNaturalist like Identify or Taxa, I’m usually going there from Explore and I often want to “take my query with me”—keep looking at the same set of observations, but in a different context where particular tasks are more streamlined. The “Identify” button at bottom right in the Filters tab on Explore does this for moving from Explore to Identify. The same feature would be helpful for moving from Explore to the “Browse Photos” page for whichever taxon you’re looking at.
I seem to be wishing for this button more often with time—suppose I want a good view of the fruits, but I’m not sure how variable the species is geographically, so I want it to be an observation from my focal area. The easiest way to do it now is by navigating through the observations on Identify and clicking through photos (for those observations with multiple) one by one. It works, but it’s cumbersome and could be much better.
One question, I suppose, would be how to handle queries that do not include a taxon specification that could be used to link to “Browse Photos” for that taxon. I dunno. Give an error message? Don’t show the button? Take you to the photos for “Life”? I can’t, personally, imagine a context in which I would want to go to “Browse Photos” without specifying a taxon, but I’m sure there is a use case. If it turned out to be popular enough to worry about, I suppose further thought would be needed.
5 Likes
It would be great to be able to create sharable custom search categories/filters.
For example: If a forager wants to see what sorts of fungi are located in New Hampshire in July, that is easy enough to do now, but if we could plug in a curated custom “edible mushroom” category filter, it would make the search much more useful since we could focus on the very specific list that is relevant to the user group.
Similar example: a person is interested in migrating shore birds. Currently one would either do a broad search of either “bird” category" or a too-narrow species-specific search. being able to plug in a curated migratory shore bird category filter could reveal precisely where those kinds of birds have been seen.
Welcome to the forum! Have you tried searching for observation fields? That sounds like what you’re looking for.
Feature: Preserving map area when switching between Your observations and Explore
Description of need:
Use case: often I go to the My observations tab’s map view to see what I observed within that particular area. I’m also interested in what else was observed by the whole community in the same area, and for that, I click to the Explore tab. However, here the Map view opens with the default zoomed out state. To find the same area I was at while looking at my observations, I need to navigate the map - which is now difficult due to the high coverage of the bright red observation place marks.
Feature request details:
Consider preserving the shown map area when the user is switching between the My observations and Explore tabs. I expect this to improve the exploration experience on iNat web, since it enables users to easier view the areas in context of the user’s existing observations in that area.
2 Likes
“Your Observations” and “Explore” on the website are effectively the same screen, except “Your Observations” filters for your user id and for verifiable=any by default (instead of all users and verifiable=true).
so if you’re on “Your Observations”, you can just open up the filters menu and uncheck the “Your observations” filter option, and that will give you observations for all users, like so:
…
if you want to be able to see beneath any set of markers to the basemap underneath, i think the best request that will satisfy this is to either allow the user to toggle the observation markers layer on/off or to adjust the transparency or opacity of that layer.
4 Likes
Back in 2019 the following post was made (initially a feature request made by a few different people, consolidated down to one general post).
-
Put the species list in a sidebar rather than hovering over the map on the Explore/Observations page
The issue is that iNat has a default map display and item placement (legends, species list, navigation controls, etc) that float over the map at fixed locations regardless of map and display size. This hasn’t really match with monitor displays for a long time, resulting in much of the displayed map being effectively unusable as it’s blocked by those tools, with additional bits of the map extending beyond them.
A better solution would be to have the tools pinned to a certain distance from the edge of the displayed map instead, or to have the species list moved off the map entirely (neither being the only solution).
Finding a solution for this had widespread support, and at the time @tiwane stated that it was one of the already established team agendas.
It’s been around 5 years and the issue remains unaddressed.
Any updates on this issue?
1 Like
At 7 decimal points you are at less than 1 inch. At 8 decimal points you are at sub centimeter accuracy. I personally use 5 decimal points which is slightly more than a meter, which is still smaller than the accuracy of the average gps unit.
4 Likes
This remains my biggest annoyance with the website and a major impediment to usability. Would love an update.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned yet or not. One of the current Android app features that I really like is the ability to (once I’ve filtered for taxon and place) open an observation and then swipe between the observations returned by the search filters. I would like arrows with a similar function within the explore page. Currently if you open an observation, the only arrows are for going between observations from that observer.
When I’m identifying on the website, I use the explore page instead of the identify page because I want to be able to see comments, etc. But it’s unhandy to need to hit the back arrow, find the next observation, and open it before being able to identify it. An extra set of toggle arrows between observations would be really nice.