Upload Observation Templates

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other:

all

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/new

Description of need:
Describe the iNaturalist community need that your requested feature addresses. Include screenshots, URLs, and other details to help us all understand the issue.

Alleviating the need to not only re-enter discrete observation fields for each upload, but to ensure that the correct ones are chosen from the uncurated mass of near identical options

Feature request details:
In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.

I came to iNat from a long and enthusiastic tenure at Mushroom Observer. With due recognition of the myriad differences between the two platforms, there are a few features from that site which myself and other fungi-inclined folk feel are lacking here, and would be worth implementing in some form. One of those is the ability to create a Custom Observation Upload Template, which establishes a predetermined set of custom fields that will accompany each new upload. Under the current system, not only must those fields be manually selected for each upload, users run the risk of selecting slightly different ones during each upload event, given how many variations there may be (see: Collection). If this functionality already exists in some form on the site, it has so far evaded me and other users.

2

An excellent idea and something which I feel would be supported by many (if not all) UK based recorders along with iNaturalistUK and the NBN (Nation Biodiversity Netwirk) in the UK.

1 Like
3

If you are really using observations/new to add observations as you suggest in your example URL, there is an existing way to do this: make a traditional project, associate it with the observation fields you want, then add observations by clicking the “Add Observations” button on the project page (or bookmark the URL that takes you to).

Another not-obvious way of doing this using the Uploader is to apply machine tags as keywords to your photos before uploading, assuming you’re using some kind of photo management software that makes this easy like Lightroom or Capture One. For example, if you have a keyword like count=1 it should add the the count field with a value of 1. Keywords like Gallformers code=d-lactea-stem-swelling will work too. For fields that have a taxon type, you can specify the taxon by name, e.g. host=Quercus agrifolia.

3 Likes