Feature request: keep ID when "combining" records at time of upload

[Dan Monceaux]

I have a little request for a slight improvement that could be made when managing sighting records at time of upload.

At the moment, if two or more records are "combined" after an ID has been made to one record, that ID is lost (the data is dumped).

I'd like to propose that if a "combine" action is made, and only 1 sighting record has an ID, that the existing ID is preserved and carried over to the combined record.

What do other users think of this idea?

I hope this suggestion falls into the right hands and makes it through to implementation...

Dan

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	Dan Monceaux
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	Skype: danimations

[Charlie Hohn]

how are you combining observations? I am not aware of any official functionality to do so

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Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[Chris Cheatle]

I suspect he means in the uploader when you can combine photos. 

If pic A has an id and B does not, if you merge B onto A, it keeps the id, if you merge A onto B it loses its id.

[Chris Vynbos]

If that is what he means, I agree it would be useful. This is the reason why in the workflow I group all my images first before making my IDs.

[Tony Iwane]

Dan, do you ever drag on observation onto another to combine them? I tend to do this because you can control which photo is shown first (it's the photo of the observation that is *not* being dragged)

Tony Iwane

[Dan Monceaux]

Hi guys, thanks for your input.

My typical workflow is:

Upload images from a particular site visit (might be a couple of dozen images, up to 100 or more).

• Look for repeat subjects (for example, a species of sponge or ascidian)
• Hold down the Ctrl key, and click on each of those showing the same species.
• Then click the "combine" button near the top of the page.

If I'm working with a large batch of images, I sometime "miss" a shot, so end up using the combine function again, after I've already put in some provisional IDs. When I use the "combine" button, with multiple sightings highlighted, all ID data is lost. It would be great if this merging of records would retain an ID if one is already in place.

I hope that clarifies my process?

In my experience, use of the "combine" button in this way does not retain ID data.

Thanks for turning your attention to this.

Dan

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[Mark Tutty]

It depends on which photo is highlighted last. Experiment with the order that you click them in, and you will find it is consistent in behaviour. And as Tony points out, drag the non-IDd ones onto the IDd ones.

[Mark Tutty]

Actually, thought deeper on this, and I am against the suggested behaviour. If you take two photos that have different IDs, which I'd becomes the combined one? In this case it makes sense to remove both, so user is forced to re-look at the combination. In the case of an IDd and non-IDd combination, you can't just assume all photos are of the same thing, as you could range-select and pick up others photos in the process. It is still better to force the reconsideration on the new combination. At the very least, any combination that changes to a non-IDd one would imply a potential problem and that would be you trigger to inspect the set more closely...

On Wed, 20 Feb 2019, 19:42 Dan Monceaux <d...@danimations.com.au wrote: