I sometimes find the size and number of images I am allowed to upload on iRecord restrictive, especially when recording hoverflies where the difference between species can come down to subtle differences like tiny hairs on the thorax or wing venation. I've raised this a couple of times in the forum, as have others, but never had any kind of response from the iRecord team. For this reason I'm thinking of opening an account on iNaturalist to use for certain records.
I've seen forum posts from several verifiers grumbling about imported iNaturalist records especially the difficulty contacting the recorder due to iNaturalist and iRecord accounts not being linked.
So my questions are:
- There is the option to add notes to an iNaturalist record. If I do this are the notes imported into the comments field on iRecord?
- Assuming the answer to the question above is yes, if I add my iRecord user ID to the note I will effectively have linked my accounts so will the verifier be able to contact me on iRecord? I know iReocrd users can't message each other directly but can verifiers do this through their dashboard if they know the user ID?
- I don't know how many iRecord users also have iNaturalist accounts so this might be an edge case but couldn't iNaturalist allow users to enter their iRecord user ID into their account so that when records are imported they are linked to an iRecord user instead of being "orphans", the verifiers could then interact with the recorder wholly within iRecord. This would stop all the faffing around for verifiers trying to communicate between platforms and the concerns about privacy/data protection simply wouldn't be an issue.
Any thoughts from verifiers would be welcome