One of the many annoyances of the iNat website was in my face today when I tried to upload an observation. For reasons, there are TWO different ways a person can approach this task and they were apparently written by two different website developers at two different times by two different philosophical approaches and nobody ever noticed (?). In one option, the user is invited to being reporting an observation by “upload photo(s)”. In this path, if more than one photo is uploaded, it must be more than one observation - there is no way to combine the selected photos into a single observation. The other path is, at least as I know it, to add observations to a project. In this path, one begins the reporting by stating “what did you see?” Thereafter, one can upload photos. However, it is a perilous path in its own right because the photo upload may or may not succeed - there is no progress bar or other feedback for a while. Then the project has an updated observation list, or about as often in my case, some website error kicks me off inaturalist altogether.
I really don’t care what process is “right” but having two processes that are so weirdly different is really annoying. Which way should I learn and then how will I know which way I have “found” when I come back after a couple or three months? It is needless frustration and the chief reason I generally refuse to even check the site: my wife who has learned the routines and “knows the way” just takes care of it. But not everyone is so lucky. If it weren’t for her I would have left inaturalist long ago. (Because, searching a project for species is also broken - you can enter a species, and get a dropdown list of matches, but you have to select one and then “go” to search the project - if you select one and press return instead, it searches sitewide even if you are on your project page with filters set. Who did THAT make sense for?)