The ideal software for tough IDs

General
1

With many IDs it’s easy, I already know what it is, or I need to look up one little thing and then I know. But, sometimes I hit a wall. Then this is the process I use:

  1. Identify the most narrow clade the ant belongs to based on the photo.
  2. Make a list of the ants in that clade in the region. This one can be hard since I can’t just use the map on iNat, there are species that aren’t included, so I need to use other resources to get a complete list. This often comes down to making a spreadsheet with the ants and their countries, selecting one or more countries and filtering.
  3. Next I want to look at the best photos I can find of each species on the list, and read the most up to date description of each species and compare it to the ant shown.
  4. As I work through the list I eliminate ants that can’t possibly match. Irreconcilable.
  5. Once the list is smaller I either post about the smaller list and the process, or if there is a clear match I make the call.

This work is spread across books, several websites and iNaturalist. No I don’t do this for every ant, but if it seems interesting or if it’s my first ID of the genus it’s important.

It’d be nice if I could pull a list of species from an iNat search, and then add more species to that list from my own sources and then check each one off, or use the links to see the data on each on iNat where it exists.

Does anyone have a streamline process or tips for this?

2

There’s this web-based piece of software i sometimes come across while searching online for identification keys, and it works similarly to what you described:
https://www.lucidcentral.org/lucid-player/
I’m not sure exactly to what extent it is customisable but it might be worth a look.
Here is an example identification key website for african tephritidae

3

In case you are not already using it, https://antmaps.org/ is quite good for that, and it does have finer resolution than “country” for larger areas like US, brazil, china and a few more.