Looking for help with my iNat Observations cleanup

[anthonywalton]

Hey All

So with alot of spare time on my hands from the South African Coronavirus lockdown, I figured now would be as good a time as ever to do a major cleanup of my iNat observations. I started “iNatting” back in 2015, then using iSpot. I’ve come a long way since then and the observations I post these days are day and night compared to the very low-res and poorly described obs I posted those many years ago. I’m looking to bring these older observations on par with my newer ones, and the problems I face in doing so are as follows:

1. Alot of my old observations, especially from 2016 to 2017, have photos which are not orientated correctly, i.e. a photo of a flower is tilted to the left/right and in some cases is upside down. This is because back then I used my cellphone to capture many of these observations and didn’t bother adjusting the orientation before I uploaded
2. Many of my older obs lack a suitable locality description. In alot of cases, when using the Google Earth pin functionality, I just went with the locality description that automatically popped up, which is usually a very generic and broadly defined location
3. In alot of my older (and even a few newer) observation descriptions, I have misidentified the dominant geology or some other key aspect of the environment in which the observation was found

With these 3 major problems in mind, can anyone offer me advice as to how to address these problems as quickly and efficiently as possible? I’m aware of the batch editing tool and have already used this to update 1.5 pages of my observations but it is quite a slow and tedious process, just wondering if there’s a way I can fast-track this, especially for things like photo orientation?

TIA

[fffffffff]

I don’t think you can change photos faster than editing each observation manually.

[kiwifergus]

I agree, manually would be best. Perhaps start with your very first observation, and then just “review, fix, next” using the green arrows at top right. Create a bookmark on your browser (I have a “bookmark bar” that is always visible) to the current one you are up to, and at the end of each session copy the url, edit the bookmark and replace the previous url with the copied one. Then you can just step through them at your own pace and in a methodical manner. When you encounter a “set” of observations that you know will be good, you can use other methods to browse and find the “other end of that set” to pick back up from and save some effort…

[Star3]

Re: point 1
As @fffffffff and @kiwifergus said, it would be a manual process, but the mobile app does have an editor that includes a rotate tool.
You could go through your old observations and rotate them while you’re already editing them to update the location (point 2) and descriptions (point 3)