Option for Maps-Off Browsing

Feature Requests
1

Trying to be a good community member by doing identifications isn’t always easy when working over a slow connection. When I’m doing so, one of the things I always notice is how much each observation page or Identify page seems to hang up on loading the Map.

Oftentimes the text info regarding location is more than sufficient to use along with the photos to guide ID. It seems to me that the map widgets that are included in almost every page of content are an area in which bandwidth/processing load for users with suboptimal connections or hardware could be reduced.

I’m reminded of the account setting on facebook where you can check or un-check “autoplay videos.” By default, if you’re scrolling down and a video enters your screen view, it begins playing automatically- not ideal for some of us! So you go to account settings, un-check “autoplay videos,” problem solved. An account setting in the same vein for “auto-load maps” on iNat is something I often find myself wishing for.

2

I definitely notice this too, even on a fast Internet connection for some taxonomic groups or levels. Though what I notice is not so much the loading of the map itself, but the loading of all the iNat observations for that taxon onto the map, that really runs slowly sometimes. Since it can still be important during ID to see the location of the observation itself, I wonder if just disabling search/loading of additional observations onto the map would be enough to solve the issue? I think that would at least be a good additional option to consider.

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3

i could see a ‘click to load map’ option. I’d almost always click on it… but at this point for coarse IDs like ‘plants’ the maps are pretty useless.

3 Likes
4

Exactly what I’m picturing… with the setting I’m imagining, the box for the map is still there as is the text location info below, but in the box is a message like “click to load map” so that it doesn’t suck up time and data loading it unless you need it.

2 Likes
5

Closing to merge with the similar existing request:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/option-to-hide-other-observations-on-maps-observation-detail-page-identify/2246

1 Like