I’m reaching out regarding some duplicates on sperm whales we’ve identified between the newly uploaded BMMRO catalog and the DSWP catalog.
These duplicates originate from the NAMSC catalog, which later served as the foundation for Flukebook. Because of this, we now have cases where the same individual exists twice in Flukebook, with the exact same photo attached to both profiles.
To clean this up, would it be possible to:
· merge the individuals so that both the BMMRO and DSWP IDs remain linked to the same whale,
· but ensure that each photo is stored only once (so we don’t end up with duplicate images for the same individual)?
We have a Merging FAQ page in our help docs that will walk you through how to merge two individual records. When records are merged, you’ll see both the old ID and the current ID on the marked individual page. The old ID should appear under “Other values”.
Are you also using Flukebook’s Data Integrity tools? (Administer > Data Integrity)?
There are a few tools here that will help you check to make sure a photo only appears once per individual:
Check for Annotations with Multiple Individual IDs: Checks for the same annotation assigned to different individual IDs
Find Annotations Duplicated in Two or More Encounters: Checks for the same annotation in multiple encounters
The potential blind spot with these is that these tools will only look for duplicates associated with a specific account. If duplicates exist between multiple users of your organization, those won’t appear in the data integrity checks.
