Toggle obscured observations on/off on maps

Obscured observations can clutter the maps making them frustrating to use and/or visually meaningless (can no longer see which areas have a lot of observations). Please add an option to hide obscured observations on maps. It should hide observations that are obscured manually by the user as well as those auto-obscured for conservation reasons.

I mostly care about this on the main observations/Explore page on the website and the Explore feature on Android. Adding geoprivacy=open helps, but does not exclude those that are auto-obscured, and it’s not an option on mobile.

As previously discussed on the Google Group.

Yes, please do this! I need to go rustle up a vote to vote for this. Please make it available on range maps too. It really wrecks the neat displays we could have on range maps by having these here, and turning them off would be super helpful. I know that would totally turn off some species, but that’s why we want the toggle. It doesn’t need to be ‘sticky’. But as cassi says even more important for ‘all observations’ type screens.Especially important too when you zoom out further and can’t even see on the points what is vs isn’t obscured.

In the long term it would be better yet to have obscured things just display as a gridded cell with darker color for more observations (like some eBird displays maybe) and not have points at all. The randomized points continue to cause tons of confusion with new users.

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:+1:
Having a better way to visually tell obscured points apart would be nice. Also points with huge accuracy circles could be shown differently (maybe lighter) - I often find observations with huge accuracy circles, sometimes larger than entire countries.

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(curious if quoting you notifies you Ken-ichi–did it?)

So, should this query eventually show obs that only include open coordinates? https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_geoprivacy=open&geoprivacy=open

Some obscured are still showing up:
image

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I did get the notification, and yes, that’s how that query should work now, except I’m now realizing that when I introduced taxon_geoprivacy I omitted setting it on observations where the taxon isn’t threatened but one of the current identifications is. Oi.

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Ok, fixed my issue and those params should be showing maps without obscured obs now.

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Ahhhhh, this is so great. The maps are so much cleaner. Thank you for doing this.

The web part of this feature request is now met. Do you think it should it be closed and similar requests for the mobile apps considered separately?

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I think this is an annoying enough problem that we should leave this open until we get these options in the UI… or make an issue to do so.

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will it ever work in the range maps? Not a huge deal since if i am looking for that i could do an ‘explore’ filter… but just wondering.

I’m gonna take my vote out of this since it’s already mostly implemented, but I’m glad it was, thanks!

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Thanks for this improvement. Much appreciated.

Might I assume that at some future stage it might be included in the filter options?

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Yeah that’s what Ken-ichi meant by UI (user interface / filters).

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Thanks: still learning the jargon.
I assume “oi” is simple Hebrew or French, and not more jargon.

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yes, I think he meant oi then! which I kinda interpret to mean “sheesh”

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or Oy Vey!

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Really? He didn’t mean “output-input”? :wink:

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Lol… or maybe “Open Interface”

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Created an issue for UI: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2190 so I’ll close this.

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Reopening until implemented in user interface of web/apps (or staff decide not to).

Hey just checking on the status of this, whether it’s a thing of not.

I don’t want to block but… A single user with a lot of time on their hands just uploaded 4,000+ obscured observations on top of me, making things frustrating and ridiculous. None of this person’s observations appear rare or anything, they said they just wanted to “protect the species.” I think the person had an old nature photo collection and simply took the time to upload everything… and they’re still in the process of adding more stuff, maybe thousands more things.

From what I can tell the filter idea was well-regarded but has not been implemented yet? Just checking in I guess, maybe this was discussed on another thread. Thanks.