Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Web
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: N/A
Description of need:
Quite a few times I have added an ID to an observation with only one picture. The angle or the quality of the pic has been such that it isn’t possible to ID to species. Subsequently the observer has added more pics to the same observation - better pics or from different angles - and those additional pictures have made a more accurate ID possible but I have only stumbled upon them out of luck.
Feature request details:
Add a notification that tells people who have previously interacted with an observation (e.g. added an ID, left a comment) that a new picture has been added to an observation that they have previously ID’d.
Or is this already a thing? I haven’t received any such notifications if so.
Not sure I care about “media removed” if I have made an ID already - that’s the observer’s problem if they want to remove evidence.
My main concern is about getting more information to improve my initial ID, so media added is critical.
Media swapped is of marginal value, because the swap could be better or worse than the original that I already made an ID on.
I definitely don’t want a spam solution - notifications are already that! I want something that improves my chances of IDing something I have previously paid attention to.
Observers usually leave a comment - ‘added more pictures’ and I pick that up from my notifications. Or the observer @mentions the one who asked for more info.
If the extra pictures are a different date, it should anyway be a new obs and linked via notes or comments.
For the things I ID (mostly bees and moving observations from broad taxonomic levels to lower ones) it isn’t all that uncommon to encounter observations where the photos aren’t all of the same organism (the usual “observation of multiple species” by new users, but also situations like several bees visiting the same plant in rapid succession).
I’ve seen it happen that an IDer points this out and asks the observer to delete the non-applicable photos, and the observer does so, but this isn’t discovered until months later because the observer doesn’t realize that we aren’t informed about changes to the media. I’ve since started specifically asking users to leave a comment once they edit the photos, but obviously this is not an ideal solution.
For some reason my experience has been that users are more likely to comment when they add photos in response to an IDer request for additional views than when they delete non-applicable photos.
Yes, I’ve seen comments in response to comments on occasion, but it doesn’t seem to be the norm, at least not in my neck of the woods. Plus I have better things to do than comment on each observation requesting more pics in the hope that the observer will comment back, which is why I am looking at this feature as a labour saving device for people like myself who spend their time mainly IDing.