Assigning blocks of images to taggers?

[Scott Appleby]

Is there any way to “assign” a set of images/sequences to specific users for them to validate classifier IDs?

I’d love to be able to assign blocks of photos to students / volunteers to identify, so that they aren’t working on the same set concurrently and know clearly what they’re expected to finish within a given timeframe. I haven't found any way to do this on Wildlife Insights so far, though.

If it's not possible currently, it could be implemented in various ways, but from my end I’d like to be able to assign images by deployment or subproject and to assign a fixed number of images/sequences to each tagger, or to divide remaining photos between a set of taggers. This feature would be incredibly helpful for anyone using wildlife insights with students, volunteers, or on any project with many collaborators.

[Alicia Mitchell]

Hi Scott,

We'd like to be able to do this too.  Do you have any tips on what you did without this functionality?  We're trying to figure out the best way to have a large group of volunteers identify thousands of photos.

Thanks,

Alicia

[Scott Appleby]

Hi Alicia,

I built an image distribution function you can use with R to divide up photos from a project between taggers (in our case, students).

It can be used with just an images_XXXXX.csv from Wildlife Insights (be sure to include images in the identify tab, and potentially blanks as well) and a number of taggers to divide amongst (you can also specify a target number of photos to assign to each tagger if you don't want to overwhelm them).

Unfortunately, due to the way wildlife insights handles filtering, it's problematic to assign exact numbers of images to each tagger as it's not possible to filter to a precise time period (i.e. 10:27:45 on 2025-08-01 to 03:22:31on 2025-08-24) because the time filter applies to all days rather than just the start and end dates.  The function provides several different ways to distribute images to get around this, but no alternate method results in perfectly equal assignments. (See the documentation / code comments for more details.)

The code and documentation is available in our public repository here: https://github.com/Sentinel-Sites-for-Nature/wi_tools/

There is example data and code in the repository you can play around with to see how it works.

Let me know if you have any questions, or ideas for how to improve / expand functionality for your use case.

Thanks,

Scott

[Monette, Victoria]

I create a shared Google sheet that lists each deployment and a spot for my volunteers to enter their name. They sign up for new deployments in the order they become available. This has worked well for me, hope that helps!

Victoria 

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From: wildlife...@googlegroups.com <wildlife...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Alicia Mitchell <akmit...@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2026 1:27:36 PM
To: Wildlife Insights <wildlife...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Wildlife Insights] Re: Assigning blocks of images to taggers?

 

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[Alicia Mitchell]

Thank you both, that is very helpful information! Scott, if we end up using the code we'll let you know - thanks for sharing the repository.