“esoteric”…
i wonder how often people actually face this kind of scenario (involving hundreds or more IDs)? seems like a relatively unusual case to spend staff development effort to create and maintain an entirely new screen just to handle this case.
also, while i don’t disagree that it would be nice to have a more robust screen in the system to find / view identifications, i also don’t disagree with what seems to be the reasoning of the iNat staff that they shouldn’t create standard functionality to make it easy for folks to add or change IDs en masse.
i think you would be more likely to get some sort of function in the system to help with your requested workflow by asking them to add a keyboard shortcut in the Identify screen to withdraw your current identification in any given observation.
that doesn’t make it easier to find your old identifications, but maybe the existing identifications screen could be expanded to accept more filter parameters, have a more graphical interface for filtering, and then, for each page of identifications, have a function to open the associated observations on either the Explore or Identify screens.
besides the graphical interface for filtering, that’s sort of what I’ve done in my own page that presents the results of the API’s /v1/identifications endpoint in a tabular format (ex. https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications?per_page=100&user_id=pisum&disagreement=true&place_id=110679). there’s a link at the top of the page that allows you to open up the associated observations in the Explore or Identify pages.
if you were to open up your desired set of associated observations in the Identify page, then if the withdraw keyboard shortcut existed, you could use that to quickly withdraw your identifications. short of having that keyboard shortcut in the system, you could use your own automation extension or program to either automate the withdrawal or to add a non-disagreeing Life ID (which would effectively withdraw existing IDs and might also provide a mechanism to help you find IDs withdrawn this way in the future). (adding a Life ID can already be done in bulk using megachile’s browser extension, and it would probably be a minor update to add functionality to withdraw a user’s current ID.)
it also wouldn’t be difficult to do all of this using a script, but even if someone set up a model script to do this, others would have to be willing to use something like that, and I get the sense that there are folks who would be unwilling to use something like that even it it was well-documented and required no unusual setup.