I’ve recently come across a frustrating (albeit minor) issue when uploading observations from the website. I usually upload many observations at once, add all of the relevant details and comments on the upload page, and then submit them - I presume many others also follow this same procedure. However, when I submit them and return to look at my observations, they are frequently not in the same order as I uploaded them. This is a relatively minor issue I know, but it’s frustrating because I used to rely on my observations being in order. I often make comments about other observations - e.g. if I upload several birds from a multi-species group, I might put in the observation notes of the first one something along the lines of “see my next few observations for the other species in this flock”. If that observation then is no longer the first one, the comment does not make sense. I’m not sure whether this has been an issue forever, but it has certainly seemed to happen more often recently. I know there are probably ways around this issue but I am hoping it would be easy enough to force the observations to upload in order.
Specific details on the most recent occurrence:
Here’s a mock-up of what my observations looked like just before they were submitted:
i assume this is the result of creating observations in parallel. if you’re sending up to, say, 3 observations at a time to the server, whichever one gets processed by the server first gets created first. processing in parallel would allow a set of multiple observations to get created faster. the tradeoff would be that the creation order of the observations might not exactly match the order you have them in in the upload screen.
if you wanted to force the observations to be created in order, you’d have to send the server one observation and wait for that observation to be processed before sending another. serial processing would be slower, but it theoretically would guarantee a particular creation order.
i’m not sure that this is a bug, but if someone wanted to change the way the page works, maybe they could add an option (checkbox) to create observations serially. if selected, this would create the observations more slowly, but they would be created in order.
Agree that this is a bit of a problem - I tried it that way when I first started on iNat, but soon discovered (as you did) that the order isn’t the same after uploading. My way of doing this now is to put in something like “see observation TBD” in the notes, then after upload go through and copy links from each observation to replace the “TBD” text. A bit of a long process if you do it frequently. There is also the “Related observations” observation field that can be used for multiple links.
