Make the My Identifications tab operate the same way as the My Observations tab

Feature Requests
4

by “my identified observations”, i meant “observations identified by me”. (my earlier label was not precise. so re-read my earlier post using the more precise label.)

my main point remains the same. you need to make the proper distinction between observations and identifications. they are not the same thing.

i understand generally what you’re requesting, and i’m not disagreeing with the general concept. but building new functionality for identifications is not really a small thing.

if you want to map observations by others which you have identified, then you can do that in the current observations page using &identified_by_user_id=[you]&not_user_id=[you]. you’re right that it’s not obvious to most people that you can do this with URL parameters, and i’m not necessarily against adding something in the filters menu for that page to make this easer to do.

in general, there’s not really a distinction between locations when it comes to identifications vs. observations. so you can get away with leveraging the existing observations screen to do things like mapping.

but when you move on to something like filtering for taxa, there is potentially a big difference between the observation taxon and the identification taxon. so you have to have something entirely different to properly filter identifications by taxa (and by potentially other things that are identification-specific).

there is an existing page (ex. https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?for=others&user_id=earthknight) that allows you to find identifications using a very basic set of filters. there is also the API, which provides more filter options but has no UI other than third-party options (ex. https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.html?user_id=earthknight&own_observations=false). neither of these existing options are anywhere as nice to use as something like the observation search (Explore) page. so i definitely think that something like Explore for Identifications would be nice to have, but it’s not clear whether that’s what you’re asking for.

3 Likes