Comments on a post on r/birding:
u/tkohhhhhhhhh . 3d ago
Could you perhaps tell us what are the painful parts you're referring to? There may be existing methods that address your pain points without the need for additional development.
u/wazawoo OP . 3d ago
Specifically, creating checklists after the fact, by going through your photos, is really annoying. If you take too long doing it in the eBird ui and refresh the page, you can lose all your counts. So then, I looked at the process of creating these files as csv first, but that process is very error prone, and you don't know of issues until you try uploading the csv.
Another part of that process is the photo ID process after the fact. That is, you're going through a bunch of pictures and ID-ing each of them so you can fill out your checklist. On mobile, this process (for me) involves checking the photos one by one in Merlin, which does work, but takes a long time. I'm normally looking at the photos on desktop and they're not always on my phone yet, which further complicates things. I'd love a way to bulk ID from pictures on desktop. I'm sure it exists, but I would love to use the same ID method that merlin is using under the hood. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available publicly, but I may have missed it.
Another one, maybe personal to me, is the ability to easily list the birds I've seen but don't have media of. I have a goal of having a photo of each species, like completing a compendium. Right now, even in the eBird UI, I can't seem to find this info without manually comparing my life list to the unique species I see in my media the media tab.
Something that really frustrates me about a certain type of new birder is the terminally engineer-brained "I have encountered something I do not understand. Clearly this is a tech problem external to me, how do I apply a tech solution?" mindset. πͺΆ
