Frustrated and not sure if this is the proper place to ask this question.
I am pretty meticulous about making sure all my recent observations have location names that are the same so I can go back using the search feature and find observations from a specific location. Great.
But when I search my observations for a location name, even though I have made sure the setting is on “any” for Geoprivacy, none of my observations from the site show up if I have made them obscure or if they are obscured because they are T/E species. What am I not understanding? How do I fix this so I can see all the observations from a location, not just the ones I have left as “open.” There are specific reasons to obscure all the sightings from a trip (you don’t want to give away the location of a T/E species, for example), but I want to be able to see those observations when I search for them at a specific location. Why can’t I make this work?
Hi @skrentnyjeff, welcome to the forum! Since this is a question and not a feature request I moved your post here to the general category so folks can chime in and help find a solution to the problem.
I’m not able to answer your question myself but I’m sure @tiwane or someone else can provide some assistance. Also, if you, or anyone, thinks there’s a bug issue you can post in the “Bug Reports” category on the forum or as always, contact help@inaturalist.org for assistance.
I have a guess at what might be happening, but it’s a little hard to diagnose without links to observations and the specific search terms. My guess is that you gave a text description of a place, like “Mytown Park and Reserve”. The size of this place is fairly small, so when the observations got obscured, iNat renamed them in order to help obscure the location. Otherwise, the box showing the location would obscure it, but someone could just look at the text to find the location anyway. I’m not sure there is any way to change this behavior that would still allow for obscuring the location. Maybe iNat can keep your personal locality notes stored somewhere and allow you (and trusted other users) to search them, but show the more general name to everyone else?