In which Wildbook did the issue occur? ACW & Whiskerbook + all?
What operating system were you using? Win 11
What web browser were you using? latest chrome
What is your role on the site? admin & researcher
What happened?
Keywords are not able to be edited or added in every image display gallery.
The image in an encounter record can have a keyword added and/or edited.
The images in a set of search results, “matching images/videos” tab, do not allow for a keyword to be added or edited.
The images in a Marked Individual’s “view all images” gallery, do not allow for a keyword to be added or edited.
What did you expect to happen?
For anywhere an image is viewable, that a keyword can be added or edited.
What are some steps we could take to reproduce the issue?
Examples:
ACW encounter search results “matching images/videos” gallery: Wildbook for Carnivores | Login
Whiskerbook encounter search results “matching images/videos” gallery: Whiskerbook | Login
Whiskerbook Marked Individual “view all images” gallery: Whiskerbook | Login
Users want to be able to search and add keywords as well as to add keywords in an individual’s gallery. A specific example here is the ability to look at a specific selection of images and be able to select and label “reference” images in order to be able to specify which images for each individual are their ideal photo for a given viewpoint. This is easiest to do on the individual’s gallery or on a search results gallery for a selection of individuals.
To my knowledge and according to our docs, keywords were only meant to be managed at the Encounter level.
Have you been able to do add/edit keywords from the gallery or marked individual page before? Your title implies that it works this way in some places and not others, but I didn’t see any examples in the links you provided that indicate keywords can be changed outside of the Encounter page.
Hi @Anastasia - I guess my question is, why isn’t the keyword functionality consistent across the platform? I would have expected that it function the same way everywhere it appears, not differently simply based on where you find it in the system. It makes the useability confusing - users have to remember where to go where to find the ability to edit/add rather than just having it work consistently everywhere.
Even the docs reference, while it’s filed under encounters, it doesn’t explicitly state that the edit/add functionality only works on encounters not anywhere else it appears in the system. I searched the docs site for “keyword” references and didn’t even realize that the page you reference was specific to keywords only under encounters because I didn’t look at what it was “filed” under, if that makes sense. So I wasn’t aware, even after reading that, that the implication is that the description only applies to keywords in encounters.
It would be great if it worked the same way no matter where they are found in the system. Users like Panthera and others will be using keywords more frequently going forward in order to label images with references important to them, which is why I was testing this to begin with.
It feels like this wasn’t intentionally designed to work differently in different places, but rather that the add/edit capability was missed in the non-encounter places where keywords are displayed.
Are users confused about where to manage keywords? If keywords are meant to describe the images in an Encounter, that seems to be the most intuitive place to manage them.
We’re still in the process of updating our doc CMS. We plan on more broadly updating the documentation so it’s easier to navigate once that’s complete.
I’m changing this to a feature request since keyword management is working as intended.
The thing is, keywords aren’t specific to an encounter, they’re specific to an image. So if there are multiple animals in an image, the keywords seen in any of the encounters could be applicable to any of the annotations in that photo. So keywords aren’t actually set up to be encounter-specific at all.
And yes, when users try to use and edit keywords, if the functionality is different in different places on the platform, then that causes confusion. It will also cause extra work for users who want to label an image as a reference image for a given individual, but who have to leave the individual’s gallery to go to each separate encounter to do that labelling, again, despite the fact that keywords are non-encounter specific.
Lastly, how do we know that keywords are working as intended? Was that design or intention documented somewhere at the time it was developed? I’m doubtful since I don’t think that developers ever intentionally design inconsistent functionality. This feels like an error or ommission to me, not intentional bad design.
This might not be a bug but I don’t think correcting an error qualifies as a feature request either.
It is a feature request. A bug is something that is not working as intended. This may be “bad design”, but it is working as intended. These definitions are fuzzier in an older product that hasn’t been iterating on features as the capabilities have expanded, but the classification is largely semantics. We are going to rework the whole platform, so this will be addressed one way or another.
Making a confusing feature more accessible across the platform isn’t going to help anyone. Keywords, as they are implemented now, should probably be managed from a separate workflow outside of encounters or individuals because they work on the image not the annotation.
This is an excellent point of feedback regarding your user’s expectations for interoperability between encounter and individual. If the object being edited is available in both, then editing should be available in both. This is a really solid point, and something we tend to overlook. Thank you for bringing this up.