I just created a new observation field that I’d like to be able to populate for ultimately tens of thousands of existing observations, so that I can pull the data for analysis. I’m comfortable adding annotations using the keyboard shortcuts, but there seems to be no comparable way to add annotations. On each observation page, the “Choose a field” search bar automatically populates a list of recently used tags, which makes selecting them easy–but this requires opening a new tab for each observation and scrolling down on each. The Identify tool is much easier to use to browse many observations, but in the Identify modal, the “Choose a field” search bar has no dropdown and requires you to either type or at least copy-paste the name of the field every time, which is very inconvenient. Is there no better way to do this?
What is the new observation field you made?
you could use a tool like AutoHotkey, which can allow you to associate a keyboard shortcut to a specific action or set of actions, or else assign a custom text replacement (ex. “$GP” becomes “Gall Phenophase”).
you could also use a tool like Power Automate (in Windows), which i think will allow you to do more web automation out of the box, though i think you can add stuff onto AutoHotkey to do something similar.
if you want to bulk add a bunch of fields to a list of observations, you could accomplish this via the API via POST /observation_field_values
I will definitely look into those tools, sounds great. The problem with the API is that I need to be able to see the photo associated with each observation before I add the field.
What value would I use for aborted galls, if any?
I could add a term for damaged/terminated etc. That category wouldn’t play into our data so it’s not something I particularly care about but I have no objection to adding it if it’s of interest to others. For my purposes it would be fine to leave that blank or infer what stage the gall was in before it was damaged.
Power Automate seems very promising and powerful. I’ve been able to set up a flow that will apply an annotation and two observation fields with just a single hotkey. It’s very fragile and inflexible but that can presumably be improved on as I learn to use it.
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