Personal folders/organization of observations

Feature Requests
1

I would like the ability to “organize” my observation page. Here is where this idea came from.

I want to only record observations I find in my personal yard. But, I would also like to encourage our city to participate in the City Challenge 2020. However, this would add a bunch of observations to my own page that are not a part of my yard.

If I could make a sub folder say “yards”. I could have all of those observations there and for the City Challenge I could make another folder “2020” and have all of those observations there. If I went to a local park, I could make a folder for that etc.

You have the idea sort of with “projects”, but people’s personal observations, don’t really quality as a project (in my opinion anyway).

I see some people with 1000s of observations and wonder if they would not like to have some way to organize it for their personal use.

2

I don’t see a problem with a backyard project --see https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/hinterhofticker-hihoti for example.

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3

Making a project for my yard list was the first thing I did. You decide what the purpose of your project is.

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4

this is sort of what I described here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notifications-on-inaturalist-please-share-your-ideas/374/37. i think it makes sense to be able to collect observations in something other than a project. for example, a lot of people (mis)use the favorite button to mark observations that they want to come back to later. you could create a project to hold such observations, but i think it makes more sense to have a different mechanism (like a folder or whatever you want to call it) for things like that.

here’s a related feature suggestion wherein someone suggests using (personal) tags as a means to categorize observations: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-search-feature-in-favorites/2502.

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5

You could add tags, e.g. “yard”, from which you can easily search. I make liberal use of tags for that reason.

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6

yes… projects, tags and fields are all great ways to group observations. I also know of some that have multiple accounts, such as a private account, and the one they use for work. The work one might be a collaborative effort by a number of users. Be careful not to “sock puppet” with the accounts, ie confirming your own observations etc.

Tags are great because you control them… only you can add them to your obs. Filtering on the tag and your own ID will guarantee you don’t pick up obs by other observers.

Fields are great, because anyone can add them.

One of my first projects was also a “backyard” project. One day someone is going to create an umbrella project and pull them all together!