Feature ideas

[JWCook]

Here is a summary of some high-level ideas for larger features to add in the future.

My long-term goal is make it a relatively painless process to go from "giant pile of unsorted nature photos" to "organized and easily browsable/searchable by relevant taxonomic or observation info."

Browsing

Taxonomy browser improvements

The main features for this are done, but there are plenty of improvements that could be made:

• Add 'user' icon to taxon info cards if observed by the user #241
• Display comments and identification details for selected observation #247
• Add colors based on kingdom/iconic taxon group #250
• Custom iconic taxon icons #221
• Combine recent/frequently viewed taxa tabs into 'history' tab with sort option #216
• Enable sorting observed species tab by either recent or frequent #215
• Add option to sort taxon children by observation count #205
• Add option to collapse/expand TaxonInfoCards #186
• Add 'starred' taxa tab #158
• Support pagination through taxon search results #23

Observation browser

• Display basic info for selected observation #9
• Add list of user's observations #254
• Display comments and identification details for selected observation #247
• Display observation annotations, observation fields, and tags #249
• Add basic filters for user observations #341
• Add filters for observation annotations, obs fields, and tags #271
• Add full text search for observations #272

Advanced

• Full observation search #245
• Observation map using OSM tiles #246

Metadata editor/viewer

• View: From main image selector, add a right-click menu item to view all EXIF/XMP metadata
• Edit: This would mainly be for keywords (both flat and hierarchical). For other structured fields (anything stored as Darwin Core), the observation editor idea below would be easier to work with.

Batch renaming

• Organize (rename / move) image files based on taxon and observation info #46
• Related: Read taxon names from filenames #50

Data export & conversion

• Store complete observation data when fetched from the API
• Periodically download all user's observations (Add list of user's observations #254)
• Export and convert user observation data #287

Accessibility

Offline usage and slow/intermittent connection handling

I would like naturtag to be functional without a reliable internet connection.

Main features:

• Offline mode #386
• Bundle (or optionally download) full taxon db with installer & packages #206
• Package taxon observation counts and leaf taxon taxon counts with naturtag #253
• Add option to download taxon data from GitHub if missing #265
• Improve first-time setup and observation download #281
• Add option to preload all user observation and taxon thumbnails #385

Misc improvements:

• Optimize bulk taxon requests #47

Supporting utilities:

• Add taxon ancestor and child IDs to SQLite db based on DwC-A taxonomy archive pyinaturalist-convert#72
• Add leaf taxon count to SQLite db pyinaturalist-convert#73
• Store annotations, observation fields, and tags in SQLite pyinaturalist-convert#82
• Add utilities to build a taxonomy full text search database pyinaturalist-convert#32
• Create SQLite full text search index for comments pyinaturalist-convert#85
• Create SQLite full text search index for observation descriptions + places pyinaturalist-convert#100

Internationalization

Currently, only English common names are used. I already have a script to generate a full text search db for multiple languages. With a bit of work, this could be integrated into the app.

• Search and display common names in other languages #305
• Populate a drop-down for locale setting #306
• Translations for UI text. It's not a lot of text, but would need to be done manually.

Observation uploader/editor

It would be very useful to add observation uploading and editing features:

• UI to edit main observation parameters (date/time, location, geoprivacy, description)
  • Could be used independently of iNat
• Upload a new observation if it doesn't yet exist
• Update an existing observation if it already exists

Annotations, tags, and observation fields

• Suggest valid annotations per taxon
• Suggest popular observation fields per taxon
• Set custom list of default observation fields to show per taxon
  • For example: pick some web/prey-related fields to show for spider observations
  • A textbox would be shown for these fields when starting an obs upload/edit for any taxon descended from Araneae
  • Will only be added to the iNat obs if a value is entered
• Make captive/cultivated prominent in the UI (maybe moreso for plants?)

Taxon comparison view

This could be similar to the taxon comparison in the iNaturalist mobile app.

• Show a fullscreen side-by-side view with a local image and a taxon image
• Allow independently cycling through both local images and images of the selected taxon, with keyboard shortcuts

Tagging

Batch tagging

Currently, the interface can only tag photos for a single taxon or observation at a time. It would be a big improvement to be able to process a large batch of photos at once.

• Add multiprocessing batch loader for local images and metadata #225
• Add batch refresh #237
• Photo subset selection #217
• Separate observation/taxon browsing vs. selecting #257
• Cluster tagged photos by observation ID and taxon ID

Automatic image matching

This would be a feature to automatically match individual local photos to individual remote photos. If you already have a bunch of observations uploaded but not tagged, this would be a massive timesaver. This may take quite a lot of effort to implement efficiently.

• Automatically find and match observation photos using SSIM #268

Geotagging

If you already have GPX track files available, it would be convenient to be able to do perform geotagging at the same time as observation/taxon metadata tagging, and remove an extra step in your workflow.

Audio file support

• Metadata access could be done via tinytag, mutagen, or eyeD3
• Generate spectrograms to show as previews instead of photo thumbnails