Run matching by marked individual OR option to match only against marked individuals

What Wildbook should this feature be in? ACW

What would you like to see?
This probably forms part of the growing cluster of feature requests around matching functionality that we’ve put forward in recent weeks. It arises from that challenge of having multitudes more unknowns than knowns in the database.
Rather than “start new match” indefinitely, hoping to find a marked individual to match an unassigned encounter to, it would be great to be able to periodically run matches against a marked individual - to find all of the encounters that match that individual.

An alternative might be to have the ability to match unassigned encounters solely against marked individuals in the system, rather than all encounters in the system.

How would this functionality help you?
Be a more direct and faster way of matching unassigned encounters to a marked individual. Also would give the researcher more certainty when matching unknowns to unknowns, knowing that the unknown that they are looking at is, in fact, not a known individual in the system and they can then proceed with assigning a new ID etc.

Hey there,
The thought of having the reverse path, matching individual against encounters is an interesting idea. We’ll look at exploring that and see what kind of technical requirements that relies on.

The alternative, matching only against matched individuals, is also interesting, and ties really well into something that we have in development. I want to explore how to incorporate the alternative with the “projects” concept we’re currently working on. I’ll report back when we’ve had some gut checks and technical assessments.

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