URL of a photo gallery, just to make sure you know which page I’m talking about:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/135289-Myrmarachne-formicaria/browse_photos?grouping=terms%3A9 (You might have to clear your place filter and gallery filters to see anything.)
As an identifier, I often look through the species photo galleries, grouping photos by taxon, flipping between male and female or juvenile and adult, and examining non-research-grade observations for difficult-to-ID taxa. In the past, these filters reset every time you clicked a link, which was annoying while flipping between views during one identification. Now that these filters are sticky, they conveniently persist while I compare different species. However, every time I begin identifying something substantially different I find myself having to clear the filters from the previous identification session. Often this will be quite some time later, so it can be misleading if I don’t remember or notice that some filters are still set. So, I’d like to see a “Clear Filters” button or something similar, which will quickly clear the filters.
That’s the newest idea. But there are also several small improvements to this page which have been rattling around in my head for quite a while:
- Add a “Clear Filters” button. (I’m uncertain whether it would be better to have this button also clear the place filter, or not. I’m leaning a bit towards yes, for consistency.) Alternately, add a timeout to the filters so they reset to default after X minutes of not visiting a photo gallery.
- Highlight every filter which is set to a non-default value by changing its background colour substantially enough that it’ll be visible at a glance. Use the same colour to highlight the place filter, when it’s set.
- Permit filtering photos by two different annotations at the same time. If one only wants to look at photos of e.g. adult females or juvenile males, one should be able to do so.
- While grouping by one annotation, permit filtering by a different annotation. If one wants to compare adult and juvenile males on the same page, or male and female juveniles, one should be able to do so.
- Make the links to higher taxa in the upper-left part of the page go to photo galleries instead of taxa overview pages.
- Make the “Search Species…” box in the upper-right part of the page link to photo galleries instead of main taxa pages. (There are two links in each search result, but on this page they currently both go to the same URL. I only want to change the left-hand one, the right-hand one (“View”) should continue to go to the main taxon page the same way it does everywhere else on the site.) Edit: there’s an existing feature request for this.
Together, I think these would substantially improve usability of the taxa photo galleries.