iNaturalist Updates for December 2023

[tiwane]

Here’s a list of iNat updates for December 2023. Thanks for helping to track these, forum moderators!

General

• iNat Year in Review released! Generate your personal Year in Review here.
• Continued work on new mobile app - in pre-Alpha testing with staff
• Continued work on API v2 - curators can test it and provide feedback, see this thread
• Many additional translations throughout the websites and apps - you can help

Website

• You can now delete annotations added to your own observations by other users.
• Various small bug fixes
• Updates to Year in Review

Android

View all release notes

• No new release.

iOS

• No new release.

Seek

• Released December challenge

iNat Blog

• December 1st: iNaturalist November News Highlights
• December 1st: A new Computer Vision Model (v2.9) including 1,409 new taxa
• December 6th: 4 am Alarm = Rare Dolphin Viewing - Observation of the Week, 12/6/23
• December 13th: Incredible Clingfish Details in Algeria! - Observation of the Week, 12/13/23
• December 18th: Identifier Profile: @maelan51 & @natael51
• December 19th: Meet the First Known Female Ovalimantis maculata Mantid! - Observation of the Week, 12/19/23
• December 28th: Meet Raju Koranga!
• December 31st: iNaturalist December News Highlights

For even more bug fixes and updates, check out iNaturalist on github and see previous monthly updates.

[bmaher222]

These are great updates! Is there any chance we could request that a like button is added to both solo and project journal posts for more engagement?

[bmaher222]

And GIFs that translate to the mobile apps.

[tiwane]

@bmaher222

Is there any chance we could request that a like button is added to both solo and project journal posts for more engagement?

How would a like button drive more engagement on those?

@bmaher222

And GIFs that translate to the mobile apps.

Note that you can edit a post to add a question to it, rather than make two new posts. Click on the pencil icon.

iNat has never officially supported animated gifs, it’s more of an oversight of supporting GIFs. At some point it’s likely we’ll convert all image files to jpegs to make the database much smaller, which would remove all animation from images.

[jasonhernandez74]

@tiwane

At some point it’s likely we’ll convert all image files to jpegs to make the database much smaller, which would remove all animation from images.

I can think of one (admittedly niche) use case in which this would be an adverse outcome. In an observation like this one: Phyllocoptes didelphis from Tar River Greenway, Greenville, NC, you can really only see the mite because of the animation. If it became a static image, in all likelihood nobody would be able to distinguish the mite from the debris.

Other than cases like that, which are rare, I agree that gif is an unnecessary use of storage space.