Auto-suggest: A love/hate relationship that causes me to ramble
Before I left for the Del Rio BioBlitz I decided to use my camera less and get back to using my cell phone and the iNat app for more of the observations that I'm not trying to turn into a photography show piece. (Sarcasm there, friends.) That was sort of a trial-run for the City Nature Challenge, where I needed to still get a lot of observations in, but without sitting at the laptop editing like mad. It has worked wonderfully! I no longer sit for hours reviewing, cropping, and being overly particular about every image. As soon as I leave a location I hit UPLOAD, and then I only have a few distance shots of birds and such to add at home. And even better, I already have IDs and comments to review when I finally DO sit down at the laptop.
I've come to realize a couple of things though, none of which are terribly surprising. 1) I love having ID suggestions so easily at my fingertips. 2) I still suck at picking the right ID.
Auto-suggest is great for very common species in very common iNat areas with clear pictures. How it can tell the difference between some of the Odonates is just mind blowing to me. But even in DFW, I frequently pick the wrong thing from Auto-suggest if I have no idea. It doesn't help that the top suggestions are occasionally species that don't occur in DFW at all.
I've debated about using a more conservative selection, but I wonder what new users are experiencing, so I continue to explore it. (I'm one of those in the "best guess" camp that tries to put my best guess on the observation and revise or withdraw as appropriate. Yes, there are many people that despise this approach, and I'm ok with that because they have their own camp. It takes all kinds...)
I've also noticed some glitchy user errors on the website auto-suggest when I'm uploading new observations. For example, I might know the tree is an oak, but if I'm not sure WHICH oak, I scroll through using the images for comparison. Often, I'll go back and select the genus or family thinking I'll dig into it more later, only to find that somehow I unintentionally selected the one oak species NOT in DFW. ?!?! I've tagged a couple of recent ones that I recall.
One thing I've come to appreciate more now that I'm using the auto-suggest is the quality and type of photos on the taxon page, that is displayed on the auto-suggest. If I know I have a Packera species (and that in itself is progress!) but not which one, I'll scroll through the suggestions to compare leaf images. Except there aren't any. There are eleventy-six pictures of the flowers (which all look the same) but not a single leaf picture. When I come across this situation (at the laptop) I will go through the images and swap out the first few to have significant identifying features pop up first. A couple of flower pics, but also leaves, whole plant, seeds, fruit, bark, etc.
I hope, despite all the incorrect IDs I've put out there --with or without the auto-suggest--, that I'm learning every day and somehow still helping to improve iNat in whatever little way I can.