From my limited experience the identotron only brings up adults of a species. Could a feature be added to select different life stages of a species so that larvae, caterpillars, pupae, tadpoles, or eggs could be compared as well as adults. Is there any way to do this at present ?
Are there links to previous discussions about this ?
Thanks in anticipation
Botswanabugs from Serowe Botswana
Do you mean you’d like to be able to select different life stages when using the Compare feature? The photos here are supplied from the taxon page, so the only way they will show up is if someone has added them. Anyone can do this.
Or do you mean you’d like to filter suggestions by life stage? This uses photos of observations, so if there are observations of different life stages they will be included in the suggestions, regardless of what the photo is.
Photos can be filtered by life stage on the taxon page by selecting View More or adding /browse_photos to the URL.
I would like the filter on Compare and Identify, so that if the observation is a caterpillar and I choose “Visually Similar” it brings up photos of the caterpillars first and I don’t have to cycle through all the adult photos of each species to see what the caterpillar looks like.
I added “Compare” to the request title since that’s the term now being shown on the site (although “identotron” lives on the URL!).
As @thomaseverest said, currently the photos are sourced from the “default” set of taxon photos for that taxon, and anyone can edit it. If anyone wants to do some taxon photo editing, it migiht be cool to make the first two photos of a taxon are two commonly seen but different looking forms of that species (eg male and female ducks, or adult and larval insects).
@botswanabugs I imagine you’re requesting something like the taxon photo browser options?
The same can also apply to the fruit or flowers of the plant. Sometime there are only a few observations with fruit which means a lot of searching. In the above screenshot the ideal would be to see larva of both species.
I think it would be extremely useful to be able to choose, when doing Compare, the appropriate life stage. Making this happen would require a bit of thought as the photos selected by folks as representative might not be annotated. So either there would need to be a mechanism on the ’ Choose photos for this taxon’ page so folks could drag images into relevant life stage “groups” or force annotation of images that are selected as being representative.
You can rearrange the sequence of photos. I do - for plants - the flower, the leaf, the whole plant. Leaving the default image first if it is distinctive. iNat recently changed to offer us Research Grade photos to choose from.
I’d be for putting a menu if it can be fit in somewhere. It’s already a tad crowded on that modal.
I was hoping the Compare button could have an option of comparing caterpillars only and leaving adults out completely. Sometimes we haveno interest at all in the adults and may want to select a species using caterpillars only.
I would like to be able to COMPARE ONLY caterpillars Im referring to the COMPARE function and SELECT. button. To be able to see a list of pics caterpillars for a certain place in order of popularity or taxonomy. I think Caterpillars in the COMPARE function should have the same status as adults.
I would support the addition of an annotations filter on the Identotron (Compare) page, that filtered by Life Stage, Sex or Phenology stage.
It would be really useful - I end up going to the taxon pages and using the pictures and Life Stage options: (e.g https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47213-Sphingidae/browse_photos?term_id=1&term_value_id=6&place_id=113055) - it would be nice if that filter could be on the identotron.
(I would also like parts, like: leaves, fruit, flowers, bark, habit, but I dont see how this could be done).
Discussed this and got the go ahead to write a spec for it. But it wouldn’t be easy to implement, so I can’t estimate if/when it will be added.
Thanks so much
Any word on the status of this request? I think it would be really useful.
It hasn’t been implemented - the staff are working on several other projects at this time, such as notifications, dashboard, and life lists.
A similiar suggestion was given in this request.
You really don’t need changes to Computer Vision, just give us a menu like:
Prioritize taxon photos in suggestions and submenus based on these annotations:
Proof of presence: Organism
By default, have each field set to the values of the observation itself, but have each checkbox be unselected.
Of course, for this feature to work, taxon photos need to actually have annotations!
