Some of what I am proposing has already been touched on here, but it was tangential so I’m creating a new topic as I haven’t found anyone else addressing this:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/improve-flow-of-identify-mode/299
When using the Identify feature, I will not always mark observations as reviewed because I want to come back to them later or don’t want them filtered out if I search for unreviewed observations. If I reviewed any observations when I reach the end of the page and select “View More” then the page reloads with “viewed” but unreviewed observations at the top and “unviewed” and unreviewed observations at the bottom. At a quick glance I can’t tell the difference between these. This isn’t a huge problem as I find the “unviewed” observations fairly quickly. However, after several rounds of this, the page is mostly full of “viewed” observations and I’m left clicking “View More” after just a few observations. When a page fills up with “viewed” observations the process repeats, but on page 2. I could select the next page, but then every page is partially “viewed” and partially “unviewed” which is unhelpful. I don’t know what the best way to do this is, but I’d like to move all the observations I’ve already looked at but haven’t “reviewed” somewhere off the page. This could be with another category, like “Mark as Interesting” or “Mark for Future Reference” but that’s probably unnecessary. It’s more temporary than that. I also wondered if something like “send to back” would work—just putting all those “viewed” observations at the end for later. But I think what I really want is more freedom to manipulate the pagination. If I could create a page break after I’ve “viewed” every observation on a page, then the “unviewed” observations that were partway down that page would be at the top of the next one and there would be an incomplete page at the front that only had observations I’d “viewed” but not reviewed. This way I could amass (and possibly merge) pages of “viewed” observations which, after I’d gone through all of the observations I’d filtered for, would be the only thing left. Maybe this wouldn’t work so I welcome other suggestions to fix the issue.
I think the best approach is to open in a new browser window any interesting or “come back to” observations, and then go to those tabs and bookmark them into a bookmark folder called “come back to these” or something similar. Mark the observations as reviewed by using the “Mark all as Reviewed” at the end of each page lot. You can then come back to the interesting obs at your leasure, and just delete the bookmarks once you are done with them.
Another approach is to create your own “Personal Follow-up Project”, a traditional project that only you can add observations to, and then you add the observations you want to follow up on to that project. Of course, it is not invisible to other users though…
The bookmark method might work. It would still be nice to have all of those observations unreviewed though, depending on how long it takes me to get through them. Then the project method might be better if you can make all of them unreviewed. I’m not sure that would end up saving any time—it might be easier just to “fave” all the observations I want to see later (seeing that I only have 2 observations in my favorites). I wouldn’t mind other users seeing what I’m up to.
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one advantage of the bookmark method, is you can have subfolders within folders. I have an iNat folder that I throw all iNat related bookmarks into, and then it is broken down into “literature”, “tools”, “cool observations”, “Projects”, “rainy day”, and so on… “rainy day” is my “come back to” folder! The “Projects” folder is where I put stuff directly related to specific projects I am working on and I usually move that bookmark folder to the main bookmarks bar so that it is “always accessible” while I am working on a project, and then drop the folder into the “iNat - Projects” folder once I am mostly done with it. I also have all my “saved Identify filters” bookmarked into a seperate folder, so I can easily switch between working on different ID workflows.
I say this, because you could create subfolders for the different reasons for which you would want to come back to an observation. If a particular subset of them require a certain book to be borrowed from the local library, then make it a subfolder that you can go back to when you have that book, or it might be “show these ones to Joe”, a friend that is not on iNat that visits you from time to time that might be particularly good on certain types of observations, etc. You can rename the bookmarks to things like “check if pustule is large enough for Sidymella angulata” etc