My team and I have been having trouble with selecting which project our observations go into. I’m admin of the collection project we’re adding observations to, and my team are all managers. Sometimes my observations go into the project, but other times they don’t appear. (This isn’t due to project exclusions, as my observations fit the criteria of the project) My team members who have androids and iPhones are experiencing issues of selecting the project also, as all of their observations are included in the project. We only want specific observations to be included, but my suspicion is that, because this is an observational project and not traditional, we are unable to select which project we want the observation to go into.
Have any of you figured out how to select what observations you want to go into a collection project? Is that only possible on traditional projects?
Another possibly helpful detail is that I’m a member of a different traditional project, and I can select (a toggle switch yes/no) if I want my observation to be included in that project. Yet, nearly all my observations default into the collection project if I fit the submission criteria.
It can be helpful to include some specific examples just to confirm, but I think I see what’s going on here, and that your guess is correct:
Right–you can’t manually add or exclude a particular observation from a collection project. It just automatically meets the criteria that are set, or it doesn’t. There’s a longer explanation here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#projectobs
Why can’t I add my observation to this project?
If you’re unable to add an observation to a project, it is likely a “collection” type project, which is essentially just a filtered search on all observations. Observations are never “in” a collection project; they either meet the project’s requirements and are automatically displayed when the project page is loaded, or they don’t. You cannot add or delete individual observations from a collection project. However, note that you can always edit the project to tweak its settings. Because a collection project is a just saved observations search, there is no way for you to exclude specific observations from appearing on a collection project’s page. Please see the Managing Projects page for more information.
Thanks for your help! We ended up changing it to a traditional project, and now our problems of selecting where our observations go should be solved. So far I’ve only tested it on my phone an account, but it works fine so far.