General identifiers will not find this of much use but:
If I start id’ing, then I can probably enter the taxonomy/bookmarks:
There will be three sections when I start id’ing by pressing the textbox.
Taxonomy:
My settings should allow a default group. in my case, true hoppers, then I click on the infraorder, superfamily, subfamily, genus, species. I can use SENP at any point. Not by default, activated manually from settings. I can enter one with a go back button until I reach the desired taxon, if above species there can be 3 buttons, view, use, and enter. (enter the taxon to see taxa under it.) Not useful for large genera/tribes but then why not just type in and then it give species only in that taxon I entered. I can use SENP freely that means that the taxon does not affect my ability to use it.
Bookmarked taxa.
You word with some taxa a little too much, probably too too much. We need a shortcut.
Before you start writing just enter bookmarked taxa which you can book- or unbook- mark from the taxon page. You can search them or click a switch to only find species found in a certain radius of the obs, if you book marked too many, although this will be used for common species, so ~50 km is enough, but you can adjust this radius in settings.
lastly, classic CVM.
if you do not turn them on they will not appear, only cvm will.
If I submitted this a feature request I know the forum guys may not allow it but I think every identifier would want this.
(haha if you noticed yes I did make the title to catch attention like yt video titles )
The list of results is exactly delivering what I’m typing in. When I ID a lot of different taxa, the list of bookmarked things would be too long. And if I just put Dicot or Tracheophyta there… I can type it myself.
So. not ALL Idetifiers would be happy about it. ;)
Aarav, thread titles should be descriptive, not vague or clickbaitey.
I agree with others that the use of non-standard abbreviations is confusing. Would you please make your top post a little easier to follow, in order to benefit the discussion?
I think your grammar was confusing me. When you state, “I can …”, I think what you are trying to say is that, “I would like to make a Feature Request which would allow me to possibly…”
and you’re suggesting some kind of Settings capability(ies) for pre-set choices and bookmarked taxa. Am I getting closer to understanding your proposal? As @dendroleon suggests, the search function for taxon names is very flexible and very quick. It usually takes very few keystrokes to zero in on just about any taxon level. Every day, I am identifying observations of several moth genera. Typing any of them into the search bar and selecting them on the Identify page takes a fraction of a second.
Regarding the use of Computer Vision for identifications, that has been specifically removed from the Identify page because it was too easy for novice or untrained identifiers to blindly select what CV suggests–resulting in a high proportion of suggested and/or concurrence with errorneous IDs. CV is still highly error prone at the species level. IMHO, it’s use even for the “Suggest an Identification” on an observation page is still problematic since the choices offered by CV have no context and some identifiers do not take the time to research even the top suggestion to see if it is likely correct.
From what I recall in previous threads, I believe the thread creator prefers to access observations from Explore rather than Identify.
I agree, however, that if one knows the name of the taxon that one is looking for, typing the name in the textbox on the observation page would probably continue to be faster than the proposed process of clicking down level-by-level in a taxonomic tree (and the CV should be overridden as soon as one starts typing anyway, so it shouldn’t affect the workflow much, though I would support an option to turn it off for those who prefer not to automatically get selections when interacting with observations).
I suspect the number of identifiers who regularly need to enter taxa not yet in iNaturalist’s database is quite small. As I am sure you are aware, your preference to only provide IDs for “firsts” and skip everything else is not at all typical; most identifiers spend the vast majority of their time identifying common species and species already represented on iNat, because the majority of observations are of such species.
Therefore, most people are not going to need to have quick access to search external name providers (the option is already displayed when one types in a name for which there is no match in the database, meaning that it should not be difficult to access in cases where it is relevant).
Yes generally because For the group I look at observations and with experience I id them to tribe, genus or even species just by seeing them which is easier on the explore page.
Imagine searching down Neonotostrophia nigrosuturalis down for 17 individual observations after spending quite some time sorting them out from the rest. I actually had done that ones. And mass ids of Neovulturnus and Heteronotus, I wish I could have bookmarked the common ones
I know, I mean it should be retained even if I’m searching under one of them.
The Identify interface has a lot of different settings; have you tried exploring some of these options to see whether one of them might work for you?
From what you have said, you are not, in fact, identifying the vast majority of observations you look at (that is, you are not entering IDs on the observations), but mentally sorting them. This is not the same thing.
Since when do you make mass IDs of a single species, given that by your account you prefer to only identify “firsts”?
Have you tried seeing whether the metadata tool linked above would meet your needs?
Sounds like a normal identification process to me. What is the difficulty that you see here?
Identification involves a lot of repetitious and even sometimes slightly tedious activities. There is no way to completely eliminate this. Changes to the interface may be able to make some workflows more efficient, but they also need to be suitable for a huge variety of ways that people approach identifying.
You have not yet clearly explained how your set-up would work or how it would provide advantages over currently available options for identifiers with a wide variety of workflows.
I don’t think you understood the point I was making. Prioritizing “search external resources” might be helpful for you personally, but it is a very niche use case; few people are likely to use it frequently enough for the advantages of integrating it more prominently into the interface to override potential disadvantages.
I changed the title. While there’s lots of potential for confusion inherent to nuanced and technical discussions, it is poor manners to be confusing on purpose.
If I were identifying, say, Neonotostrophia nigrosuturalis, I’d type in something like “neon nigr” and that would be likely to pull up he name I wanted. In fact, usually just 3 letters for genus and two or three for species are enough.
This tool allows you to define your own buttons to assign taxa, which you can also assign to keyboard shortcuts. This is what I use to assign frequently used taxa. In some cases, I have two versions for the same taxon - one to add the taxon + male annotation, and one with female annotation (ie. I assign both the taxon and sex annotation with a single keyboard shortcut/button).
You can define multiple sets of buttons, so when you’re working on one group, you can have one group, you use one set of buttons/shortcuts, and when you work on a different group, you can use a completely different set of buttons/shortcuts.
You can also select multiple thumbnails on the identification page and apply one of your pre-defined IDs to all of them. I use this. For example, I might select a subset of thumbnails and apply a life stage or sex annotation to them. Then I might click “select all” and apply the taxon ID (via the keyboard shortcut I have defined).
If you install the tool you can probably have much of the functionality you’re after up and running the same day. Experiment a bit and tweak your button definitions until they do exactly what you want. The designer of the tool is VERY responsive - in my experience, they added requested enhancements within a day or two. Even if iNat agrees to implement your requested feature, it may take a long time for them to roll it out, and in the end, it may not exactly match your request.
This tool was such a dramatic game changer for me that I can now undertake mass ID audits that I would have never attempted using the standard web interface. YMMV
Normally, I wouldn’t either. But after reading some of the discussion around it, and what it could do, I decided to make an exception. As I said, it has revolutionized how I do identification.
Good luck with your feature request. I wouldn’t hold my breath on getting it.
It takes two to communicate. If your meaning is not being understood, it is also possible that you have not expressed what you want to say clearly or provided enough context for others to make sense of it. Or it may be that people do not understand you because they do not share your experience – as in this case: I do not understand what you find to be unreasonably difficult about entering an ID multiple times. It is not because I lack experience with IDing or with entering difficult-to-spell scientific names.
)