Show my own photos in "species list" in new Life List

Feature Requests
#1

The new lifelist feature - www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/username - vastly improves one of the perhaps lest emphasized functions of iNat, the ability organize your own listing on it. However, it is currently difficult to look through my own species if I have more observation of each of them. That’s because I have two options: either show all the observations individually, sorted by date - and see my own photos in the thumbnails - or switch to “species”, where I can nicely order it by taxonomy and see on item for each species - but with the default species photo, not mine.

I am thus proposing to add a function, which would work exactly as the “species” tab in life list right now, but would show my own observations instead, perhaps allowing me to tag, for each species, which of my photos is shown for it. Otherwise it could look and work exactly the same as the “species” tab does today, so making it hopefully easy to implement, as no new graphics interface is needed.

This would turn the lifelist into a “gallery of my species” - which is I think I currently keep for some families outside of iNat and having this here would for example motivate me to enter my 2400 species of bird to iNat in some capacity. So this makes me think that it could also motivate others to put more stuff here, which is, after all, the ultimate goal.

Ideas for a revamped Explore/Observations Search Page
#2

I was thinking something like this would be nice too, my thought was in the Species tab of Your Observations using Explore, which is what I usually use instead of my life list. But that seemed too specific, so I didn’t suggest it.

#3

Ideas for Explore page improvements or changes can be added here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439

#4

I never though about it, simply because the “lifelist” option as it currently exists is just closer to the desired result than the “explore” page. But if the “explore” part gets a complete revamp, then it could make sense to have this there as well, that is a great point.

#5

Yes this would be extremely useful. I find the default species photos are often unhelpful - for trees for example - because they tend to be centered on things such as flowers which are only visible for a very short period. Ideally they would show leaf from both sides, bark, form and then flowers and other key distinguishing features but more often than not they don’t. I found this thread because I was wondering if I could create my own species life list just as a special purpose private list.

Cheers Andrew

#6

Possible, but would impact site performance and would have to be based on some sort of rule, not manually chosen. If implemented, it might have to be a view you have to manually toggle.

#7

Thanks for the reply! Manual toggle is fine I think, there is already plenty of such things. The need for automated selection is understandable, as implementation of the manual one would be more complex I imagine (with the added need to store this information).