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Pre-Sync Review

In this guide you will learn:

  • What the pre-sync review shows and how encounters get there
  • Encounter completeness requirements
  • How to approve, deny, and edit encounters
  • License and organization assignment
  • Bulk actions and filtering

What it shows

Section titled “What it shows”

The pre-sync review displays all materialized encounters from an approved manifest. Materialization takes the manifest’s grouping rules and creates concrete encounter records with their associated images, metadata, and review status.

Each encounter row shows: image count, date, photographer, location name, GPS coordinates, review status, sync status, and license.

Encounter completeness

Section titled “Encounter completeness”

An encounter must have all required fields before it can be approved:

FieldRequiredHow to fix if missing
DateYesEdit the encounter inline or fix in the manifest
Location nameYesSet a location override in the manifest editor
GPS coordinatesYesEdit inline or set a GPS override in the manifest
Photographer (resolved)YesGo to Photographer Resolution in the manifest editor
LicenseYes (for sync)Assign via the license dropdown

Encounters missing any of these are marked Incomplete with a specific reason (e.g., “missing GPS” or “photographer not resolved”). Incomplete encounters cannot be approved.

Review statuses

Section titled “Review statuses”
  • Pending — Ready for review. All required fields are present.
  • Approved — Will be included in the next sync.
  • Denied — Excluded from sync. Use this for encounters you do not want to upload.
  • Incomplete — Missing required data. Cannot be approved until fixed.

Approving and denying

Section titled “Approving and denying”

Select encounters using the checkboxes, then use the toolbar buttons:

  • Approve Selected — Mark selected encounters as approved
  • Deny Selected — Mark selected encounters as denied
  • Approve All — Approve all pending encounters (requires all to have licenses)
  • Reset All — Reset all encounters back to pending

You can also approve or deny individual encounters using the buttons in each row.

License assignment

Section titled “License assignment”

Every encounter needs a license before it can be synced. Three options are available:

  • Public — Data is freely available
  • Public + Attribution — Data is available with attribution required
  • Private within Organization — Data is restricted to your organization

Use the License dropdown in the toolbar to bulk-assign a license to all encounters, or set it per-encounter in the row.

Organization assignment

Section titled “Organization assignment”

Each encounter can be assigned to one or more organizations. This determines who owns and can access the data in finwave.

Organizations can be auto-applied by photographer — if a photographer belongs to a specific organization, their encounters are automatically assigned to it.

Editing encounters

Section titled “Editing encounters”

Click an encounter to expand its detail view. You can edit:

  • Date and time
  • Location name
  • GPS coordinates (latitude/longitude)
  • Photographer name
  • Internal notes
  • Known individuals (see below)

Changes are saved immediately. If editing fixes a completeness issue (e.g., adding missing GPS), the encounter is promoted from Incomplete to Pending.

Editing known individuals

Section titled “Editing known individuals”

Each encounter has a list of known individuals — the animals the contributor reports were present. The discovery pass extracts these from folder names, file names, or IPTC keywords (per the manifest’s Individuals source). When that misses one, you can add it directly in the review row:

  • Add — type a name into the chip input and press Enter or ,. The name becomes a chip.
  • Remove — click the × on a chip.
  • Multiple chips can be entered in one save.

When you save the encounter, the desktop app sends the chip list to the server, which performs a get-or-create against the population’s catalog: existing IDs are matched and reused; new names are created as catalog entries on the next sync. The new individuals are persisted as Attested evidence on the encounter — the contributor’s claim, not an ML prediction.

Files moved or renamed since the last scan

Section titled “Files moved or renamed since the last scan”

If you renamed, moved, or deleted source files after running discovery, the review page surfaces an amber banner at the top of the page:

N files moved or renamed since the last scan. Sync will skip these files until discovery runs again.    [Re-run discovery]

This is detection-on-open: every time you open the review page, the desktop app checks each file the manifest references and counts the ones that no longer exist on disk. The banner only appears when at least one file is missing.

Click Re-run discovery to jump back to the originating scan job, where you can run the scan again. After discovery finishes, return to the manifest editor, regenerate the manifest, and re-materialize — the new filenames will be picked up.

Filtering

Section titled “Filtering”

Use the filter bar to show specific subsets:

  • All — Every encounter
  • Pending — Ready for review
  • Approved — Marked for sync
  • Denied — Excluded encounters

The header shows counts for each status and an approval percentage.

Section titled “Related”