Split Encounter when you realize its two individuals

What Wildbook should this feature be in?
All eventually

What would you like to see?
I would like to manually select some but not all of the images in an encouter and split those into a new encounter

How would this functionality help you?
During work, I sometimes come across encounters that are actually two individuals, and there is no easy UI/UX way to split them.

2 Likes

Just adding a +1 to Shane’s suggestion – I’ve just hit the same situation (three individuals added to the same upload) in Sharkbook: https://www.sharkbook.ai/encounters/encounter.jsp?number=94fe8774-2540-4a5f-bee2-e05400f5f331

Thanks,
Simon.

Hi @ShaneGero and @simonjpierce

I think the best workaround for this is to:

  1. Add a new manual annotation the image you want moved to its own encounter so that Wildbook will make a clone of the encounter.
  2. Then you’ll go to the cloned encounter and edit the Identity field to remove the identity of the incorrect animal and add the correct one.
  3. You can go back to the original encounter and remove the image that’s been cloned to its own encounter. If you’re not sure which encounter is which, the cloned encounter will have “cloned annotation” in the Audit Trail of the Metadata section.

Come across this issue again, and when I add annotation to the second animal, it says:

Created [Annotation e676a29f-54ee-40b5-9461-327a26546625] on Encounter [8f5370a4-fb91-4097-bc49-c0b4dccc7795]

This is the original encounter. How do I find the “Cloned” encounter?

I checked and verified that there aren’t any cloned encounters associated with this original one.

Two annotations with the same iaClass in a single photo are what creates a cloned encounter. When that happens, you’ll see a link below that photo to click between annotations and view the cloned encounter.

The cloned encounter will also list it as a clone in the audit trail:

So I can only split an encounter with two individuals, IF both individuals are in the same frame? What if there are 4 pictures in the encounter and two frames are of one whale and two of another? Can I split this encounter into two encounters each with two pictures or do I need to delete the encounter and upload two new encounters?

Also I tried splitting based on new annotation within the same frame here: https://www.flukebook.org/encounters/encounter.jsp?number=b20f8a16-db48-42e8-9005-b71b12ec3214 But if you click the green arrow to go to the clone - they have the identical encounter number in the URL. So if I delete all the pictures of one whale from the main one, and then delete all the pictures of the other from the cloned one, how are they differentiated if they have the same URL?? Will these export as two different encounter with two different IDs?

Here is a good example of the other type: https://www.flukebook.org/encounters/encounter.jsp?number=f894c334-c21b-4210-9fef-2656d860f565

In this encounter, the first three flukes are one animal (24a, 24b, 24c, while the other two pictures are of another animal (24d, 25).

Can I split these into two enounters, or do I need to delete this and then reupload as two different encounters?

If two different animals are in the same image, then there wouldn’t be an issue of assigning each encounter/annotation pair as its own Marked Individual. Your original post was asking about separate photos of each animal.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds with hypothetical situations because then this conversation gets too difficult to follow as we’re deviating from the original post topic.

That’s definitely weird behavior. I checked and verified your new annotation did not create a cloned encounter but should have. Do you mind deleting the manual annotation and adding it again to see if it behaves this time? If not, I’ll have to investigate that separately as a bug report.

If I understand this correctly, you should be able to follow the steps I posted earlier in the thread to clone the encounter of the different individual and update the identity on the cloned encounter:

If this feels too tedious or confusing, you can also delete Individual 2 from individual 1’s encounter and upload individual 2 separately.

yes something is not working correctly. In matching other whales, I found this public data submission with two whales in one encounter. So this is a totally separate Encounter from above where 1 picture is one whale and the two others are of a second whale. I removed the annotation from the one picture, then manually added another, but it just put it back into the original encounter (with the same URL), not a new cloned one with a different URL.

This is the link to the annotation: Flukebook | Login

Thank you. I’ll need more time to look into this.