Hey Anastasia - I am also having a duplicate ID issue in Flukebook with Hyperoodon and not sure where it is stemming from but there are quite a few multiple duplicate IDs. Is there a way to resolve this within the system?
Hi @ljfeyrer
I moved this to a new topic since the previous one is over 2 years old.
The most common reason duplicate suggestions of the same individual appear is because a user used the New Individual field from your screenshot to enter the ID instead of the Existing Individual field for a known individual.
We have a ticket for this issue here: Set new individual ID allows for duplicate IDs/marked individual pages to be made · Issue #1037 · WildMeOrg/Wildbook · GitHub
We have a Merging FAQ with instructions for how to merge duplicate individuals.
Ok thanks. I am not sure if this is because of a manual added duplicate ID or something that happened in bulk upload… It would be good if it couldn’t happen!
Revisiting the Merging FAQ I would say that if the IDs are identical (e.g., 5199, 5199, 5199) then the steps to merge them as described are challenging as there is no easy way to tell which of the duplicate IDs in the picklist is the “correct ID”. I think merging this way would work in the case of a misidentified duplicate (e.g., 5199 = 5100), but not in a literal duplicate.
Agreed! Mystery duplicates have plagued us for a while now. I look forward to the day they’re finally prevented!
Yeah, I think your best bet here is to follow the first set of steps on there and have each duplicate individual opened in its own tab and manually unassign and reassign the encounters to the one true individual. Once all encounters have been removed for an individual, that individual page disappears. Luckily, it doesn’t look like there are too many encounters for each in there.
Hey revisiting this as there are multiple IDs in the Hyperoodon project that have multiple duplicate IDs, not sure how to tell exactly how many? Manually correcting this seems really time consuming - should I put in a feature request to make it easier to merge IDs?
Ooh, a way to reconcile multiple individuals into a single one? That’s an interesting one. I’d say to solve the root of the issue, we’d need to fix the ways people can accidentally create make duplicate individual records, making the need redevelop the existing merging tool unneeded. I’ll see if I can get any info on this one from the devs this week.
I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but we also have the tools in the Data Integrity menu that help you find duplicate individuals to help make cleanup easier.
Under Administer > Data Integrity look for Annotations with Multiple Individual IDs which will show you duplicate annotations that have different IDs assigned to it. The table will link to the duplicates found and have a separate link to merge the two:
There’s also the Annotations Duplicated in Two or More Encounters tool which will also show you if any annotations that appear in multiple encounters and shows you whether or not those annotations have an ID. This is another way to scan for duplicate entries. It doesn’t include the link to merge any individuals, though.
ok so this showed me 16 results and made me realize that the “root” of the issue may in part be due to the way we originally populated flukebook for hyperoodon as Jason is the owner of that bulk import and I cant access it due to admin privileges 
Perhaps this is worth a quick chat or direct email as I think a couple of the issues I’m trying to resolve are related to this initial data import?
Oh, interesting! I’m going to send you an email with a link to schedule a meeting since that might be faster than parsing it out through email.