Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Safari 13.1.2 (14609.3.5.1.5)
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.): When I use the bulk uploader, there is usually some order I choose for the sequence of observations added. For instance I often group together uploads of a given genus or family in the same upload. In a recent upload of eight observations (see the Scopariinae moths from Aug. 9-12 in the link above), I had carefully grouped observations of each species together and for multiple uploads of a species, there were multiple days which were arrayed sequentially in the uploader. However, the outcome of the upload in the Your Observations grid view was quite scrambled (see screen shot). I had hoped to keep my sets of species observations together as viewed in the grid for ease of comparison (e.g. side by side) but thatâs not the way it turned out.
Is there some uncontrolled timing or random sequencing of a set of observations during the upload process? Why arenât the observations uploaded in the sequence I set? Is this something I just shouldnât expect to work?
Clicking that Filters button gives you an option to control how your observations are sorted. Sounds to me like youâre looking for âDate Addedâ as the sort option, instead of âDate Observedâ. If you are really wanting to get fancy with your filtering, you can additionally use the âRankâ filter to choose what taxonimic ranks you want to display. For example, selecting âSpeciesâ on the âHighâ box and âSubspeciesâ on the low box will show Observations between (and including) all taxon ranks from species to subspecies. Alternatively, using the âDate Addedâ and âDate Observedâ filter terms can let you zoom in on one observation session or one upload session.
Lastly, you can use the âSpeciesâ box on the filter to reduce your list of Observations to just what you want to be comparing. For example, if I select âButterflies and Mothsâ in the species box, I will only see those observations. Naturally, you might personally have a much finer search term than âButterflies and Mothsâ if you have a lot of targeted observations in one taxon.
Thanks, @hamiltont. I use those filters regularly and I tried playing around with them in the present circumstance. Unfortunately, the âDate Addedâ sort is not specific (fine) enough to address the issue I described above. I added eight observations in one bulk upload in a specific order and they came out displayed in the grid in a different order within that upload set. Sorting by Date Added may be recognizing the millisecond sequence of when the uploader finished each observation, but if the uploader was not faithful to my sequence, there is nothing I can do to change that. So within one bulk upload, there seems to be no guarantee that the observation sequence I set on the upload screen is the sequence after the upload operation. Iâve seen this happen occasionally with bulk uploads and always ascribed it to the uploader needing to take a few extra milliseconds to parse the data in some observations versus others. This sequence discord never bothered me prior to this particular occasion.
I am aware I can filter at the species level if I desired to compare all my observations of a single species or at the genus level to see all my observations in a genus, etc. However, I had hoped to be able to compare my eight Scopariinae moths group together visually by species, e.g. âSp A, Sp A, Sp B, Sp B, Sp B, Sp C, Sp D, Sp Dâ. Filtering after the upload by genus cannot reconstruct such a desired sequence; the set of observations within a filtered genus are still in the scrambled sequence created by the uploader. The only work around I am seeingâif I am really insistent on this level of sorting precisionâis to upload the observations singly in the sequence I desire. This would dictate the sequence on the Your Observations grid, but of course the work of doing uploads singly is less desirable.
Iâm usually not so interested in the upload sequence as I have been in this instance. This was just one of those moments where I uploaded several very similar species at once and had hoped to view the fine details of each image side by side. I think Iâm just expecting too much of the uploaderâexpecting it to read my thoughts! ;-)
This is definitely possible. The uploader most likely does not upload one photo at a time, it probably uploads a few at a time (e.g. ~5 at once). Itâs definitely possibly itâs screwing with the display order slightly by recording the upload time as the time each photo finished uploading. If that is happening, it could be considered a small bug in the uploader. If the desired user experience is âuploaded photos should stay in the same order they were shown in before the uploadâ.
But yes, sounds like there is no perfect fix for your use case. Iâve never played with âtagsâ much, but I know each observation can support tags that you define (e.g. âunknownâ or âvirginia-bugsâ, etc). Maybe you could specify tags and use those somehow?
Currently, the uploader uploads a maximum of 3 observations concurrently, and thereâs no saying which one of those three will get created first. It might be possible to make the uploader create observation in order, but it would slow down the uploader. Personally Iâd not be for that, itâs already somewhat slow.
