I would prefer something of this sort as well, but I imagine it would be rather complex to implement.
Whereas adding a button would not require changing the underlying sorting mechanisms but merely provide another way to access existing functionality. So my idea was that it would be a quick and easy fix to make things a bit more convenient for users until such a time as a better solution might be found.
Having a button would regularly save me a few clicks.
For most of my activities in Identify I need to see the entire observation (larger photos, observation metadata, existing comments and IDs, annotations tab) so I am almost always working from the pop-up window and not from the thumbnail view. Meaning that if I finish a page and want to page back, I currently have to close the pop-up window, potentially scroll down to the bottom of the page to click on the number of the previous page, and then open the pop-up window again.
If, on the other hand, I want to page forward, all I have to do is click on the “next” button that is displayed when I have finished the page (except that this results in the aforementioned shifting of observations when I have not reviewed everything; given that I rarely review everything, I generally follow workflows that do not involve this button).
So the change would create button parity by easily enabling both actions for people whose workflows make it desirable to page back at least occasionally.
The gain is, admittedly not huge, but the development effort required to add such a button should also be fairly small, so the outlay seems proportionate.
There are lots of reasons why one might not clear the page after looking at all the observations on it. A big one is that for the sort of IDing I do, there is typically some portion of observations I am not skilled enough to ID now but I might want to look at in the future. Or I may be going through checking something like observations with IDs not expected nearby and only adding IDs to the ones that are wrong and leaving the false positives unreviewed.
Another reason I use Identify is for adding annotations; while adding annotations removes observations from the set (similar to marking “reviewed”), there are usually a few observations that can’t be annotated and so don’t get cleared out when I go to the next page, creating the same problem outlined above and making it convenient to work backwards from a high page number.
Ah, yes, I missed the difference between this request and mine, probably because the left->right and top->bottom reading order is so ingrained it would not have occurred to me to start at the bottom of the page.
But putting both buttons in both places would seem to be an ideal solution that would cover most if not all ways of navigating through the page.
