After I had purposely zoomed in on the website to ensure I accurately put the cross in the right place (Dun Laoghaire West Pier in this case), I received this comment (I think fully justified) :-
That’s great! The location has a very large uncertainty radius, taking in most of Western Europe. If you edit the location you’ll be able to narrow that down
i cannot understand how this can be when I put the pin exactly on the Pier ? Also, I had cause to update location on multiple observations but ended up doing this one by one. For future is there a way to update location on multiple observations ?
Observation “accuracy” (the uncertainty radius) is a separate value from the location/coordinates, as you could have multiple observations at the same point but with different sizes of uncertainty. You should be able to edit that. (It looks like you are using the new iPhone app which I don’t have, so I can’t tell you how to do that.)
I believe there is a bug with the app that sometimes produces ridiculously large accuracy circles that the observer did not enter. I don’t know if the causes have been diagnosed or whether a fix has been found.
Go to the observation page for the problem observation. Click on the blue Edit button at top right. Below where it says “Where were you?” there are some location details. Click on the number next to “Acc (m):” and type in a new number, such as 20. Then zoom in on the map, click on the red pin to highlight the accuracy circle, and drag one of the points around the edge until the circle is as small as it can be while definitely including the true location of the observation subject. When you’re satisfied with its size, go to the bottom of the page and click “Save Observation”.
I’m happy to help, so if you need clarification on any of that, don’t hesitate to ask. If you have a lot of observations with this problem I can also give you instructions for bulk editing.
We think one key is how far you zoom in. In our experience, if we zoom in and set the location while a whole large city is in the map, the accuracy circle could be hundreds of meters. If we zoom in as far as the map can zoom, the accuracy bubble we set will be one meter.
I make observations only through the website. On the bulk uploader I go through a similar process for each observation (or multiple at once if they were made close together). It’s slightly easier when uploading than editing, but essentially the same. I don’t know how location works on the apps, but a lot of people upload things with no accuracy/precision data at all, which is one of my pet peeves.
There isn’t that I know of, although that would be a good idea. However, I wrote out instructions in another topic for bulk editing location accuracy, which I’ll modify slightly for you and post here.
From your homepage, click on the Edit Observations tab.
Click on “Batch edit”.
Check the boxes on the observations that you need to update (or Select All, if you need to edit the entire page), then click “Edit Selected”.
Click “Batch Operations”.
On the right side of the highlighted area, find where it says “Acc (m):” in small text. Click that. In the small box below, type in your number.*
Click the “Apply” button below the location section, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Save All”.
If necessary, scroll down, select Page 2, and repeat.
*When batch editing, make sure to use an accuracy number that will work for all of the selected observations. What this is will vary depending on how you place your location pinpoints, so I can’t say what the best option is for you. If you rely on automatic location data from your phone or some other GPS device, the first step is to find some of your observations where you know the exact true location and can find it on the map. Go to the single-observation Edit page for one of them and zoom in until you can see both the red location pin and the actual location. Without moving the pin, drag the edge of the circle until the true location is just inside. Then check the accuracy number. That’s the minimum number to use when relying on that device’s GPS capability to provide your location pins. You should check as many observations as you can because sometimes it varies based on how good of a signal your phone was getting at the time of observation. Whatever the largest number you got was, add five or more to it to increase the odds of being accurate for all observations. Then you can use that for your bulk updating.
I use the website to upload all of my observations, and manually input most of my locations and all of my accuracy circles during upload, so I’ve never had to do any of this myself. If you can edit location accuracy on the app during the upload process, I recommend doing so going forward. It slows you down a little, but it’s worth it to not have to worry about it after upload.