Adam Kranz’s meta data tool is awesome. I started out using it to mass annotate, but now I’m using it a lot for species IDs. Being able to use the buttons instead of typing out the ID is really nice.
Definitely. I asked for the option to disagree with an annotation and he added it very quickly.
for that, you can use the ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ function on your computer
I find the keyboard shortcuts faster than using the mouse to hit buttons. What I have found particularly useful when doing certain tasks is to group related things together so that their keyboard shortcuts can be easily typed using just the left hand - leaving the right hand free to just move from one observation to the next using the arrow keys.
For example, I have been adding a “wear” field to thousands of observations for a particular set of closely related species in hopes that the degree of wear will help us refine the phenology (where the flight seasons of these different butterfly species overlap).
I have assigned keyboard shortcuts as follows:
ctrl-Z: assigns wear = “worn”
shft-Z: assigns wear = “fresh”
alt-Z: assigns wear = “moderate”
“Z” has no obvious relationship with “wear”, but because the Z key alone gives you the zoom function (which you often need when assessing wear), I can do everything easily without moving my left hand, and I use my right hand to type the arrow keys to go from one observation to the next. Great for going through many pages of thumbnails and just assigning the wear field.
Just an example of something that never occurred to me when I first started using the tool to define my own dedicated buttons/shortcuts, but I eventually clued in to. There are probably lots of other things I can do to speed things up that haven’t occurred to me yet.
Yes, this tool is massively helpful, and allows for easy annotations while you ID. If I’m about to identify a bunch of moths in a certain genus, and there are only a few options, I make a button for each one, include the relevant annotations that will apply to 99% of my IDs (organism, adult, alive), and then just tap right arrow - correct button - right arrow - correct button etc. If it’s a taxon you know well, you can clear a page per minute without much trouble. Manually typing the name over and over again when you’re IDing the same thing a bunch of times is a waste of time and entirely unnecessary.
One of the few times that you’ll see 100% agreement on anything in the iNat forum.
This is an example of my workflow. In bulk mode I select all and then click on the odd ones out. Most Taxodiomyia observations are of T. cupressiananassa. Then I use my keyboard shortcut Shift+T to apply the Twig Gall button actions to all of those observations. Then after a refresh I go through the others one at a time using either the keyboard shortcut or clicking the button depending on my mood.
You can’t copy more than one species at a time and paste them separately depending on the need.
no idea how to use this, and I think it is for galls only.
You can if you use a text expander, for example. There are lots of general computer tools that would help you do what you want to do.
The screenshot is from the metadata tool that people have been talking about, which allows people to create customized shortcuts for things that they want to enter frequently.
The tool is customizable. You can define whatever you want. You can use it to assign IDs, set annotations, add observation fields, subscribe/unsubscribe, agree, etc. etc. It allows you to do pretty much everything you would do during normal identification tasks. You can define a button that performs multiple actions (for example, assign a taxon to the observation and set the sex annotation to a particular value).
The tool allows you to set up multiple menus, so you can use one menu when performing one set of tasks and another menu when you’re doing something else. You can export your configuration so you can install it on another machine (if you use multiple machines), or share it with a collaborator.
To learn what it can do, you should follow the link posted earlier. There’s a bit of a primer at the start of the forum thread.
I don’t think I can use it on Safari as a browser.
But you can use it in another browser - download firefox or DuckDuckGo or Ecosia - those all work.
Yes, for some tasks, this kind of workflow works well. For something that requires close examination of each photo (like sexing some butterflies, or assessing wear), you may not be able to work from the thumbnails. In that case, you can click one observation, then navigate from one to the next using the arrow keys, applying the appropriate action to each observation as you go. As I said, I found that if I’m working in that mode, it makes sense to define the actions I will apply as a set of keys that can be easily typed with my left hand. That way, I can quickly work through a page of observations without taking my fingers off the keys (unless some special handling is required for one of the observations I encounter).
That’s the beauty of the tool - it allows every user to create an optimized ecosystem/workflow for each of the tasks they need to perform. Why it required a non-staff developer to come up with this is a separate question.
I just can’t handle those, I’m too used to Safari.
The comment I was responding to is the one where you say “making mass ids of a single species”
you clearly have a capacity for learning - you’ll get used to other, superior browsers.
I do the same thing! sometimes I’ll just research grade all the needs ID of a specific species I get into for a region and it helps to have it copy pasted. Though I think it isn’t that much extra work, and would probably require around the same if we had a dedicated feature…
I totally understand not wanting to learn a new browser, and you absolutely don’t have to do any of this, but for what it’s worth, I use Chrome only for iNaturalist on my laptop, because it allows me to use both the metadata tool and the iNaturalist Enhancement Suite (which has tools that expand use of the CV).
One advantage of using this browser only for iNaturalist is that I have a clean slate of bookmarks and tabs which I can set up just for this one use, instead of having my browser cluttered with all the other things I do on the Internet. For me it has been well worth the effort.
I use 20 tabs at a time sometimes so that is why it feels like a nuisance to use chrome.
I was just giving an example of the sort of thing you can do with the metadata tool. I set that all up, it is not something that comes preset. I wanted to show how I deal with combining doing some IDs in bulk and some IDs one at a time to make things go quicker than going through all the observations one at a time. And also show that you can add an ID, annotations, comments, and observation fields all with one keyboard shortcut.
