I think I posted something regarding this years ago, and found a few similar older locked threads by others too. I was hoping maybe someone had figured out a workaround.
Like many people I obscure observations made at my own home and other private residences. These make up the majority of my observations, hence the giant rectangle over my county on the explore map. This rectangle also encompasses the public locations I make observations at that are not obscured. So attempting to search for just my own home observations for a āyard listā using the map has never worked.
I had thought when the āsaved pinned locationsā feature was rolled out that it was a possible solution. I pinned my home and gave it a descriptive name and used it for all my home observations. I thought this would work like an E-Bird custom place. I even went through and batch edited old observations to use it so that they would all be consistent and searchable. Then later realized the saved pinned locations were not actually searchable anywhere?? They all show the same saved custom name on my āedit observationā pages, but when I hover over the links, the coordinates are all different (obscured). My custom saved name doesnāt show up on any search that I can figure out, but itās clearly visible on the observation pages and edit observation pages. Is there a querystring I can use to search for my observations using it?
Iāve seen some people recommend just adding tags that can be searched forā¦ which I should probably do going forward. That doesnāt help with my existing 12k observations, especially since there is seemingly no easy way to search for the right observations to add the tags to using a bulk edit.
I cannot provide an iNat-inherent solution. My workaround was to download all my observations from that larger area and then apply a formula in Excel to filter for those within a defined rectangle
If using a pinned location, this would be even easier (just filter for observations with the specific coords in Excel). But I also donāt know any solution to view in an iNat map for instance.
I think the only ways to show the home obs stats all on one page within iNat without other observations are still to 1) use obs descriptions or tags as you mention, 2) add them manually to a traditional project, or 3) create a place that encompasses them, create a collection project for the place, then edit your settings so you trust your own project with hidden locations. The latter could then of course show the true location of your home as the boundary on the map, but if you didnāt mind a handful more obs getting in, you could draw the neighborhood or other boundary that includes a bit more area. The latter would be the least amount of effort to set up and maintain.
To bulk edit in batches you can still use the Edit Observations page map to view your own obs at their true locations. Zoom in and redo search in map area. But you can only view and edit 200 at a time.
I donāt see how your suggestion #3 would work, given the OP would like to keep their observations obscured. As the place would be rather small, the collection project wonāt capture those observations, as they are hidden and thus wonāt lie completely within the project borders. Or did I misinterpreted something?
The way I did this for my yard observations was with the edit observation page. I made a yard project for myself and then added this to the query on the edit observation page.
&geoprivacy=obscured¬_in_project=project-name
There may be better automated processes for doing it. But you can do 200 at a time this way from the edit page. Itās pretty quick to add to project there. If you obscure often away from home, this method probably wonāt work. I do occasionally, so I had to manually remove some from my home project that I accidentally added through the bulk method. I used tags in the past, but thereās so much more functionality built around projects than tags.
I did just vote for that feature request and I do remember reading that post fairly recently. I thought we only had like 5 votes for feature requests, but now I see it says 100 votes! When did that happen?
I remember similar discussions from back when this forum was on Google Groups, which I found I had referred to in a post I replied to in 2019 about automatic geofencing for privacy. I also voted for that old feature request too now!
I was kind of hoping that something had changed in the past seven years regarding these issues and I had just missed it because I havenāt been as active reading forum posts for quite a while.
I love advanced search options and had hoped that those newer āpinned locationā names would at least be searchable by now.
So for now I guess the best solution still seems like using tags. I did at least think to check to see if I can limit a search to just tags instead of tags/descriptions. If I used a tag with the word home or yard in it I didnāt want it to pull up every observation where I may have used those words in the description, like āIāve never gotten to see this at home!ā That would be counterproductive for sure! I could bookmark a search of my own observations with my home tag and that would essentially be a searchable yard list. I just have to remember to always use the tags going forward, and slog my way through bulk editing 12k old observations in chunks.
I do still hope there are changes in the works for the way the obscured observations are handled though. Currently, those of us that make a lot of obscured observations create some pretty messed up looking maps. Apologies for that.
I built a site that connects to the iNaturalist API and offers features that are present in the API but not present in iNaturalist Explore page. One of the features I added is the ability to filter observations by geoprivacy.
For āSearch forā, select āObserversā. Then type in your iNat username.
Then click āFiltersā, and go to āGeospatialā >> āGeoprivacyā. If you want to see the unobscured observations, select āOpenā. If you want to see the obscured observations, select āObscuredā, āObscured privateā, and/or āPrivateā depending on which settings you used when you made the observation. You can select multiple options.
Thatās a misleading statement ā there are some API parameters which legitimately do not work on the Explore page, but the majority of them DO work, theyāre just not present in the GUI. Search by geoprivacy is one of those, i.e. you CAN search by geoprivacy on the Explore page, you just have to modify the URL rather than relying on the GUI.
Thanks for that info on using the api. I havenāt tried anything with it yet, but itās good to know itās available if I want to try and tackle that at some point.
I had figured out that I could search for obscured observations on the explore page by using the same querystring parameters that the edit observations page uses, even though it isnāt shown as an option on the search form. Iād hoped I could find a similar way to search the āprivate_place_guessā field for the names of my pinned locations right on the website. Just searching for my obscured observations would also include those at other peopleās homes nearby.
I think having some built in default setup for grouping and highlighting our at home observations would be really good. Maybe help people see that nature may be or could be right outside their front door. I may be moving soon. I have this naive idea that maybe I can prevent a new homeowner from ripping out all the plants and replacing it with a monoculture of turf grass, concrete, a trampoline, and a firepitā¦ which seems to be the new norm around here. Maybe if I leave a copy of āBringing Nature Homeā and a link to my iNat yard list, they might think twice about ripping it all out? One can hope.
