Best way to share an observation either on Facebook or Twitter with one click.
If this is not already there(I can not find), it would be nice.
I’ve been logging into the website cut&pasting the ULR into FB& Twitter. Looking to streamline the process
H
If you’re referring to the app, on Android at least, there is a share button in the upper right of every observation:
(sorry for duplicate, I think you also asked this on Twitter?)
I wish the iNat integration “social media” features were better.
The button bouteloua pointed out is hard to see (I also had to ask on the forums to learn about it).
The button just shares the URL to the web page (which is fine), but the full web page isn’t built for mobile devices and thus is hard to use on a phone. A part of me wants the iNat URLs to open in the iNat app (if installed on the device), but at the same time I’m not sure, because the app has some inconvenient limitations (can’t easily view full Wikipedia article, etc.).
PS.
On the old forum people also talked about wanting a more simplistic page that can be shared (sort of like an info card, or “embedded” observation).
Perfect reply! Followed by sound of hand on forehead.
I agree with Henry! But things have just made a huge step forward for me today.
Cheers and thanks to you both, H
No visual preview if we share observations to FB. Not a good situation for publicity.
Came here to make a similar feature request, but I’ll add my idea here.
Other social media platforms have both a sharing feature ("Share to Facebook too! Post on instagram too! etc), which would be great - imagine if right before you hit upload on your new observation there are checkboxs for “Also post to instagram? Also to facebook? Also to twitter?”, as seen here:
I would probably do this every time I posted, and would be a great way to share with our friends our own enthusiasm for observing nature, but also improve the visibility of iNaturalist and attract more users. yay!
Second and related request would be a standalone “Embed” option similar to how Instagram and Youtube do. Essentially, with a click it generates an html iframe snippet which you can drop directly into many different platforms.
Here’s an example Instagram embed (you can embed public instagram images on any site). Note the nice frame and display of peripheral information. edit: looks like 1 image max for new users, check it out here: How to Instagram Embed
This would also give us a great way to share and showcase observations on all manner of medium around the web, while giving you the ability to drive new users into your platform (note the tantalizing “add a comment…” field in the widget).
That’s all. Thanks for building this awesome platform and community. :)
it’s not as elegant as the embedding options provided by Instagram, YouTube, etc, but iNaturalist does have an observations widget (see https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/widget). you could modify the code that it gives you a bit to style it differently, or to focus on a specific observation (add &id=[observation id] to the widget parameter list).
if someone was feeling generous, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to write some code to for displaying better embeddable observations for social media sharing.
I would love to be able to share observations easily to Twitter or Instagram, most of my Insta posts are nature photography anyway lol
It would definitely be a great way to attract more users to the site! I tell people about it all the time and they seem interested but actually getting them to visit it is the hard part.
Please make separate feature requests for these, they’re pretty different than the original request.
For the web, I don’t see much of an advantage to having a button rather than copying and pasting the URL. Is it much more convenient?
That being said, iNat observations don’t work too well when pasting the URL into Facebook, which is something we need to work on. Twitter seems to work fine, in my experience.
Hi - I wanted to underscore the importance of having a nice looking post for Facebook (that includes at least the picture, if not a map). Even better would be the ability to translate iNaturalists observations into a Facebook album. This will allow iNaturalists to share their hobby on this important social media platform, and could be great for increasing the popularity of iNaturalist, especially during the current lockdowns :-) Should I create a new feature request?
Yes, that would probably be best. I’ll close this request.
