Recently I saw a comment somewhere that someone felt they had mastered all of iNat’s functionality within weeks. This surprised me because as I have said, I feel like this platform is a bit of an iceberg, wherein there are all these uses and intricacies of which I am unaware, even as I am gleefully enjoying a fraction of the shiny surface.
This belief is borne out every time I see an exchange like this:
… and also each time @pisum or @jeanphilippeb adroitly finds the solution to someone’s request.
So my question is: what iNaturalist function, feature, use or aspect do you wish you had known about earlier and think others might benefit from knowing about? It can be one that was announced, one you stumbled across, or one that was cobbled together for you or someone else.
As always my answer is Similar Observation Set. I find it such a brilliant tool for recording one individual over time in multiple Observations and wish I had known of it far sooner.
For months I did identifications from UK and would search for where the new ones began by remembering what I had seen before. Then I noticed the button for marking a whole page of observations as reviewed. More recently I found the way to add an extra photo after you have submitted the observation is to click on the little grey picture icon.
Searching by observation field! This feature is a bit hidden. If an observation has an observation field, for example “Provisional Species Name”, you can click on the name of the observation field and it will pop up an interface for searching by that observation field. I used iNat for years before discovering this feature and now I use it all the time.
The keyboard shortcuts in Identify X Casual, A Agree, C Comment.
And more depending on which screen you are on. Annotate caterpillar L and L.
And then text expander. That is not IN iNat, but it certainly makes it easier, more efficient and kinder! to use. If I only have to craft an encouraging response for a newbie once, then I can be kind, and informative, with a relevant link.
No, actually. A lot of these are user created, which since you are newer you likely may not realize.
Prior to posting I did a search to make sure there was no existing similar topic (I know you likely did the same, as I have noticed you like to provide links to similar or related threads); I know tips, including wikis, are scattered here and there but in a thread, we can communicate, as a community, and maybe we can all benefit. Or just share a bit of our journey as a community.
I appreciate your approval of my posting this topic, though I am not sure what “surface” and “it” refer to. These might be technical terms with which I am unfamiliar.
Any iNaturalist function, feature, use or aspect to share that you wish you had discovered earlier?
Maybe I’m a minority, but, the existence of traditional projects! For too long I thought you could only make projects that could be automatically filtered, and wondered whatever happened to, well, traditional projects! I guess it doesn’t help that it’s tucked away at the bottom of the “create project” page.
That the Filters button has an “identify” option. I knew about the Identify tab, but when I would pick a given project or user, there was no Identify tab for that project or user; I was having to open new tabs for each obervation I wanted to review. The “identify” option in Filters changed that.
i love this project but am not familiar with how they work - is ‘joining’ enough to get updates on my homepage? am i able to add observations from other people? i don’t think i have any chonky spider obs but i saw a realllll fat one on inat earlier today lol
I knew there had to be a keyboard shortcut for identifying something as casual. I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts as they are so much faster than switching back and forth to a mouse.
that’s a great question re: updates on your homepage :) I actually don’t know! as for adding obs, you should be able to join and add observations to the project - it’s not locked down! please, join and add some fat spoods!!
That the little keyboard icon at the bottom left of the Identify pop-up was a list of all the keyboard shortcuts! For a couple of years I assumed it was a button to give you a pop-up screen keyboard.
I’ve been on a mission to annotate Lepidoptera records for the last year, but it was a rocky start. I think I annotated several hundred observations by finding them in the explore tab (not filtering for observations that were already annotated) before I learned about the identify tab and its annotation filters. Then I annotated several thousand observations by finding them in the identify tab but opening up each observation to in a separate browser tab, before learning that I could do it right from the identify page. Then I annotated several thousand observations by manually clicking the annotations before learning about keyboard shortcuts. Now I can annotate thousands of records in a single day (on a good day).
