What is the one thing you wish you could do on iNaturalist?

Julie: I also am a student of some the finer aspects of iNat, but I think they are saying the only way to crop your list of ID’s is to manually edit the url line and, within the scope of the few parameters available, you can view a sub-list of your ID’s. For example, the link by schizoform will give you a list of ALL of your ID’s for others. To crop further, say to one taxon name, just add to the url line the phrase “&taxon=xxxxx” where the x’s are the number for that species or group. This number can be found by moving to a species or group page, and looking in its url line (often a 5- or 6-digit number). For example, the genus Hibiscus is number 48891, so adding &taxon=48891 will crop your list to only that group. Once happy with one such search, you can bookmark it, and then always return to it, editing the url line again to some other option. BTW - I like your idea, and voted for it, to save all this bother!

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How about a guide to everything you can do with iNaturalist URLs? Maybe that could go into the help section under “Advanced” perhaps?

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Like this perhaps?
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki/63
:-)
tonyrebelo has an extensive list of parameter examples in a joutnal (I think) post (I’m on the phone app at the moment or I’d post the url - you can search Journals in the website for him or I expect someone will post it in this thread).

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Have you guys ever watched a Charlie Brown cartoon? You know when the adults talk and all you hear is “wah, wah, wah”. If you were saying these things, that is all I would be hearing. Really don’t know what you mean. Just one nice, easy link to search is all I am looking for. You know, for the computer illiterate such as myself.

It might help if you say what part of the above instructions becomes confusing for you. Your comment comes across as really dismissive since they’re earnestly trying to assist.

As said above, there is already an open feature request to add an “easy” way to search your identifications (which you don’t appear to have voted for), so it’d be better to continue the conversation about that potential new feature at the existing topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-identifications-searchable/1304

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The URL searching confused me a bit to begin with too, but I find it really helpful now!

Basically, when you type in iNaturalist.org/identifications, there a bits you can write after that which tell the website what type of identifications you want to see. If you type in “?user_id=juliereid” after it, it tells the website that you want to see all the identifications that are made by the user (that’s the ?user_id bit) called juliereid. So that will search for all your identifications!

If you only add that bit, though, it will show you only identifications you have made on your own observations. To make it search for your identifications on other people’s observations, you can add “&for=others”. The “&” tells the website you want to do more than one thing, and the “for=others” tells the website you want to look for your identifications on other people’s observations.

So if you click the link…
https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?user_id=juliereid&for=others

…Then that’s what it will search for. It’s not immediately straightforward, but hopefully this will help.

You can tell the website to only show you other things too, by adding more bits to the website address (using the whole “&” thing we looked at earlier). This link is a bit confusing too but it does help explain all the other things you can do quite well: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki/63.

There’s not a simple way to do any of this yet, like there is with observations, but hopefully this sort of workaround will help you until there is. :)

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Julie, at the top of the page in your internet browser, the space that shows the address of the page you’re on (“www.example.com/etc…”) is the URL bar. If you click on it, you can edit the text of that address.

All of these other replies have been about ways you can edit that address to create a custom search. When you click buttons for different parameters to search your observations, that tells the website to automatically edit that address to give you the results you want. But there are more ways to search than there are buttons shown, so manually editing the address by just copying and pasting those bits of text folks have been posting (they all start with “&”) at the end of the existing address lets you do more than the buttons do.

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I certainly wan’t being dismissive at all. I just don’t understand any part of what they are saying and thought humour might help it not sound negative. I said that I appreciated their help, and loved how helpful people are on this site. I was talking solely about my inability to understand, not their willingness to help me.

No worries, Julie - it’s the internet; it’s hard to be clear. I’m sure as hell still working on it. Did we succeed in the end?

One thing that I imagine might make a difference: If you’re accessing iNaturalist through a web browser, you probably have the url at the top of your screen. But if you’re on your phone, in an app, I don’t know that’s true. And in any case, I don’t think you’ll get the easy search functionality that you’re looking for. So I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful! And on the other hand, if you do decide to dig into it, I hope you’ll feel good about the advice you’re getting and the effort you’re putting in.

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I am going to try and understand it, but it will take some time. I am no computer expert. I really do appreciate how helpful people are on this site and on iNaturalist. I have learned a lot through the generosity of time and knowledge that others have given me. I hope this will be one more thing I learn, but please don’t hold your breath.

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One thing I wish I could do on iNat is edit pictures as I’m uploading them(desktop version), or use the app to edit pictures at all. I try to go through the pictures I’ve uploaded to an observation and it always shows me duplicates that aren’t actually there and I end up deleting all my pics.

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Thanks.

THIS is my biggest wish (and/or an in-app photo editor with circle/arrows, provided they reside on a different layer so it doesn’t confuse the AI/computer vision, but still is a nice visual for human eyes):

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/draw-bounding-box-on-photo-for-computer-vision/2554 (unfortunately, it’s closed now so you can’t vote on it but it IS being investigated)
similar to this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/inaturalist/pictures$20star/inaturalist/HmenVLycDqQ/A565DyVrBgAJ

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Thank you @star3 for searching out and pointing to related feature requests.

We’ll see how this thread evolves – if it starts to become too redundant with the Feature Requests section of the forum, we might just close this and point folks there instead.

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The circles and arrows would be a fantastic idea!

I also wish I could save locations because I do tend to return to the same spots often, and I don’t like walking around with GPS active.

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The one thing i wish I could do on the site - convince the site to drop the ‘each observation is for a single individual rule’ and build a standard easy way to record frequency for those who wish to do so.

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Yes, I wish I could save the coordinates for a location as well. Most of my photos are from my yard. Originally I chose “obscure” so my address didn’t show, but then that prevents my observations from showing in the project location I created.
Now I use the coordinates for a city park that is basically behind my house. That way I can keep the location open and not have my address show.

Bottomline for the location though. There should be a way NOT to have to obscure a location and yet NOT have a home address on display for the world to see.

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The thing I’ve wished for for quite some time is a way to create “personal projects”, or collections, or whatever you want to call them. I’d like a collection for things observed in my yard, and things I observed on a trip to Costa Rica, and things I observed on a trip to Iceland. A collection for all the moths I’ve added to all the years of Moth Week. If I felt like doing a “square yard” project, I’d want a collection for that.

I’ve run across projects that it appears people have set up for this purpose, where only one person is adding to the project, but these concepts are really different things. One is for public participation, and the other is for personal organization. It always feels weird for me to come across one of those “personal” projects and see that it’s just for one person.

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Is that what the life lists are for?
(I don’t really understand life lists)

Maybe something other than projects would be good, like collections or albums. Something just for the user’s personal use than a public project everyone can contribute to.

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