Hi everyone. I’m late to this party but @tony_wills has already nicely summarised my current solution to this. That is, to add an observation with no ID, so it doesn’t show up on the map. And, set to “No” both of “Based on the evidence, can the Community ID still be confirmed or improved?” and “Evidence of organism” (when there’s a photo), so it doesn’t show up on the Identify page. And, the observation field “Taxon sought but not found” is set to what was being looked for (eg Papilionoidea for butterflies). It’s clunky as anything but does work.
Why do this at all? I use if in class exercises at university where I send my ecology classes out to look for some taxa, eg. butterflies, in a set period of time (for butterflies, we use 20 minute surveys on sunny warm days). iNat works fabulously, especially with all the computer vision and community help with the IDs. I also like that it gives the students familiarity uploading observations on iNat so in the future they’ll use it when they find new and interesting things. The only problem is when they find no butterflies at all, which is where we need our clunky “sought but not found” solution. If there wasn’t some way to enter these observations, we wouldn’t be able to use iNat for these surveys.
I’d love to see a more elegant solution to this on iNat. I also understand the developers’ reluctance to feature creep in this direction.