I’d like to create a feature for an “observation slideshow” to showcase the biodiversity of a property, region, or project. I’m imagining a full-screen feature that displays 1 observation at a time in a super simple elegant way - the photo(s) from the observation fill the screen with just taxon info as text, and then passes onto another randomly ordered observation after 5 seconds. Any developers already working on this? If not, I’ll give it a try.
In a couple of related topics linked below, it has been mentioned that there is an old, non-configurable slideshow functionality that can be applied to projects, by adding /stats_slideshow to the end of any project URL.
Otherwise no more general slideshow functionality currently exists, and I think would be much welcomed if you wanted to give it a try. I may be wrong, but I get the sense current staff don’t have much appetite for developing this, with everything else on their plates.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/presenting-a-project-as-a-slide-show/7968
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/present-data-in-full-screen-slideshow/3289
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Indeed, I stumbled across the /stats_slideshow feature during my preliminary search. It is quite nice, but I’m looking for something a bit different. I am by no means a web developer, but this project seems simple enough. I’ll see what I can do.
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not sure if @petermarting ever got around to developing something to display a slideshow of observation images. so i went ahead and made a very basic page to do this.
page: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observation_slideshow.html
code: https://github.com/jumear/stirfry/blob/gh-pages/iNat_observation_slideshow.html
it’s not super elegant code, and i haven’t really tested this very thoroughly, but i thought i’d go ahead and put it out there in case anyone is interested in it. i may make fixes and add features later, as time permits. if anyone has suggestions, feel free to suggest away, or expand upon the code, if you like.
one feature i’d like to add later is something to handle this case:
regarding:
i haven’t built in any functionality to randomize observations, but the API does offer an undocumented order_by=random parameter that could be used to randomize, although your requests get cached. so the random sets returned will actually change only after some period (15 minutes?) or after you change some other parameters in your query.
UPDATE: one more thought… i suspect part of the reason iNat staff may not have put a lot of effort into making a feature like this is that something like what i’ve made here could effectively download a lot of data. i’ve limited my page here to return a maximum of 1000 observations, but if you assume that each “original” sized photo is roughly 2MB, then displaying 1000 photos would require downloading around 2GB of data. although the system is free to use, someone still ends up paying for all the infrastructure to support all of this. so i guess just keep that in mind if you do use this slideshow thing.
for reference, the API developer recommended practices doc says:
Downloading over 5 GB of media per hour or 24 GB of media per day may result in a permanent block
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Hi @pisum, I’m trying to figure out the code. Sorry I’m a complete newbie at this, but once i generate the code what exactly do I do with it. Is there any way you can help me generate a slideshow like this for a specific project?
the page noted above gets photos based on a set of user-defined parameters and displays them in a slideshow format. for example: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observation_slideshow.html?project_id=the-wilderness-center. if you go to the page without setting any parameters, it will give you some instructions on how to use the page.
here’s some information about setting parameters in the URL: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki-part-1-of-2/63.
if you still have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
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Awesome! That is exactly what i was looking for, thank you so much. Any plans to put an iNat logo on it in the future. I bet a lot of organizations would be interested in it.
i’m not planning to put an iNat logo on it because it’s not an iNat product, but you’re welcome to adapt the code, and you can put in whatever kind of logos you want.
I’m going to close this as it’s something that’s ripe for outside devs to work on and it looks like @pisum’s done that. Thanks!