iNaturalist Wishlist Manager
Download HERE
While planning for a recent trip, I thought it would be nifty to have the ability to create wishlists for various species and search for nearby observations for taxa on that specific wishlist.
So I put together an installable Tampermonkey script that creates this tool and persistently saves the wishlist across your browser sessions. Unfortunately, right now it does not save the wishlist between devices/browsers to link it to the user; however, it can be exported as a CSV.
This tool exists in 3 ways,
- A wishlist star on every taxa page, next to the filter by place button. Clicking this star adds the taxon to a default wishlist, and right-clicking allows you to add it to other specified wishlists. Clicking on the “Wishlist” text brings you to a search for all observations of species on your Wishlist.
- Wishlist from the species grid. Here, with any observation search, the grid of species within the species tab each has a star that allows you to add it to a wishlist. Again, right-clicking lets you choose a specific wishlist.
- Wishlist manager. This is where the separate wishlists can be managed, exported ect. You get to this pop-up by right-clicking on the Wishlist text on any Taxon page.
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Search result from clicking on Wishlist:
Your wishlists can be as detailed or specific as you choose. I have not fully tested this on the new mobile-compatible pages that iNaturalist is pushing, so it may not work as intended when that mode is enabled.
The broader goal of the tool is to enable better trip-planning, letting you immediately build an observation search query for specific target species.
It also works nicely with a separate “Random Taxon” button I have created with another script.
For identifiers, the Wishlist Manager also has a button to create a url for all outstanding IDs linked to those taxa, so I hope it can also be useful for those folks!
Right now, the wishlist is wholly centred on taxa and cannot be limited by location or other tags, but you can add that through the search URL easily.
There is no commerical element of it, or plans to make this anything but a free userscript. It operates fully locally, not sharing any data beyond your device. Wishlists can be shared by you through exporting them as CSVs, adding an import button is my next step.
Instructions for installation:
To use this, you must install Tampermonkey or another userscript manager. Your best bet is to follow the guide here. Once that is installed, you just need to navigate to the script page and press “Install This Script”
If anyone wants to build on this, let me know and I am happy to git it, otherwise you can see the full script yourself and make changes locally with TamperMonkey (Vibe Coding should totally work with it too).
If anyone has suggestions or comments, please share! I’m keen to make this as useful for people as possible, so if people have idea for use-cases I havent considered, shout out!
Thanks,
Nathan.