So, often when I have some time I’ll go through the identify screens with the “unknown” filter on and just lump things into the highest taxon I’m comfortable with. I often feel silly doing this, because yeah, that’s obviously a flowering plant or a spider or a basidiomycete, but my goal is to move t…

super helpful. to keep it manageable I have a filter setup around my area, and try to keep the unknowns restricted to just very difficult taxa (e.g. algae, slime mold vs fungi, unidentified objects, or mistaken observations pending deletion)

I observe a lot of galls, but I’ve only learned a few to the species level. What I do is add my gall observations to the Galls of North America project, where people who know their galls tend to give IDs quickly. It helps to know at least the genus of the plant the gall is on, however, and the proje…

Thanks for that project reference Lynn, and also for the kind words of encouragement. (I’ll be sure to mention your support on my next tumble down the cliffs of Mt. Stupid. Which means… pretty soon.)

[image] arboretum_amy: I have also cohosted a few virtual events dedicated to IDing unknowns. What a great idea!

I just started doing this when I saw another recent thread about it. I hope that I will learn as I do this. But I have a question. What is the quickest/easiest way to find the “unknowns”? I can click on “Identify”, and I assume these are the newest added. A search for “unknown” doesn’t bring up any…

[image] vreinkymov: On the phone app, there’s currently an option in settings to prevent auto upload / auto sync which takes care of uploading unknowns without an ID. Is this still a problem when using the website interface? The web site warns you that you’ve left off an important thing (ID, …

Sorting the Unknowns is considered a valuable public service. And I learn a lot doing it, especially when I’m wrong. One thing I encourage you to do is to set the “reviewed” flag for things you skip over because you don’t have a clue. Otherwise, these observations just pester you over and over agai…

[image] jbecky: identification in the description or as placeholder text sometimes that is a tiny typo - just the one letter wrong or missing - iNat is UNforgiving. You can Fave or Follow an obs where you want to watch the ID discussion unfold. I can Coleoptera … and in a couple of hours it…

The main issue I have with going back to Reviewed items in the Identify view is that they are all grayed out, so it’s hard to re-review them in the thumbnail view while trying to pick things out of the big pile. I wonder if there’s a way to just de-obscure the thumbnails in that view, without using…

Instead of Favoriting observations if you want to know what they turn out to be, you can Follow them. That has the advantage (or is it disadvantage?) of not putting them into your Favorites list.

Identifying taxa just to remove them from "unknown"

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Is it worthy to (vaguely) categorize “Unknowns”? General question	27	897	May 17, 2025
Does anyone else get bothered by how many observations are marked as "unknown species"? General question	233	9289	February 25, 2023
Thoughts on unknown ID level? General	60	1288	December 8, 2025
Why are some accounts adding super high level ids to my unknown observations General question	81	3758	September 22, 2022
Amount of "Unknown" records is decreasing General	557	38053	September 6, 2021

Identifying taxa just to remove them from "unknown"

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