Is there any point in filling in Annotation data?

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I do a lot of identifications/confirmations. Most folks don’t fill in the Attribute data (now we have one more), and so I dutifully fill it in. Since that process is slow, it makes me a bit reluctant to do things “properly”. Are these data useful to other people, or does it really not matter to others?

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Annotations? I think they are useful, more so with certain taxa (e.g. life stage on butterflies & moths). You don’t have to fill them in of you don’t want to though.

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As far as I can tell, there’s no way to even add the annotations from the upload form, which is probably a big reason why even people who would happily add this info do not.

I’d say it’s pretty cool! For example, I did some quick annotation adding, and now you can see all photos of Pteromys volans which show an alive animal, rather than having them hidden amongst the photos of its poop :smiley:

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You can sort of do them with an upload, you just have to include/insert a corresponding field. For example, when I include the field “Insect Life Stage”, the annotation for Life Stage will be automatically populated upon uploading. Same for “Sex”.

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Huh. That sounds like it should be pretty trivial to change the upload UI to just have a more user-friendly way of setting them that just does exactly that in the background. I assume there’s a feature request already?

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There’re many points that I think were all discussed in Annotions topic.

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Thanks all for the feedback. I will continue to fill those areas in when I do my confirmations.
I don’t add many observations myself, and when I do I go back to the observation and add those data. I hadn’t realized how much work that would be if I was adding a lot of observations at one time. So, as well, thank you for allowing to see that point.

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Yes, and I made an issue for it to be added on our GitHub page: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2353

I try to always add annotations to my own observations after upload, it doesn’t take too long. I bookmarked the URL below and I’ll see all my recent verifiable observations in Identify and I can annotate them quickly using the keyboard shortcuts.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&user_id=tiwane

If you replace “tiwane” with your username in the URL it will work for your observations.

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