Add observation - Automatically tagged my observations with incorrect names based on photo filenames

Yes it is a new feature where the site attempts to classify a species based on the contents of the file name. It’s been buggy to say the least, and is already documented.

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Thank you! I hope it gets fixed fast :)

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Not fixed yet. I had a bunch of images with the file name Herrings Cove (location where the flora & fauna were observed), and all were automatically identified as Herring species - the fish ;-)

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I’m not sure there’s a “fix” to be made, it’s working pretty much as designed. The issue is that a lot of words for things like places or other things match scientific and common names (even Eos is a genus name, which tripped up a Canon user). We try to maintain a list of commonly used troublesome words, but it’s never going to be complete. My preference would be to not try and match common names, only scientific ones.

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Thanks. Scientific name only would hopefully eliminate some of the common name match problems. Can I ask why the new feature to match species by a file name rather than just the image was added? Can’t be a big percentage of iNat users worldwide naming their photo files by species before they’ve been uploaded and identified?

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Maybe this was the reason? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/extract-species-name-from-photo-filename-upon-upload/6510 (I wasn’t following this before I noticed random IDs on my observations, so I’m not sure)

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Thanks, you could be right.

So is this automatic identifying from file name going to continue indefinitely?

yes - it is working as intended. There is another thread about it.

I think we looked at the filenames of photos uploaded via the web and found that a good percentage of them included taxon names, much more than we expected. Personally I just add them as keywords via my photo software and don’t change filenames, but apparently I’m in the minority.

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But will it stay that way as iNat grows? As mentioned to @kueda, I need to name image files by location, and many places in NZ are named after flora & fauna (Maori or common name), so the new feature taking the ID from the file name is creating extra work having to delete AI’s incorrect suggested species.

What about a feature in a user’s account settings where you can turn on or off iNat suggesting taxons from the photo file name? But still allow iNat to suggest species from the image itself :-)

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Hopefully it does stay as iNat grows, it’s an incredibly useful feature.

You don’t have to accept the name iNat provides, you still need to confirm that it is the name you think the species is. If it’s not all you do is clear the name and reenter it or let the auto-suggestion run with the blank file name.

In that aspect it is no different from how iNat used to work and it adds a lot of usability to the site.

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Yes, the new feature is great for people who name image files by species, saves them time, but has become a hinderance for people who name photo files by location which happens to include a taxon name. It’s an extra two steps to upload images when this happens. First you have to delete the incorrect species ID. The cursor doesn’t appear in the species search box after the deletion, so you have to click back into the box to get AI to suggest a species, or type in a species name. This might not sound like a biggie, but when you upload a lot of obs, or the internet is slow, it becomes time-consuming. As I said to @tiwane, an on/off switch for taking info from the photo file name might solve the issue for everyone.

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I have photos with location names, ones with species names, ones with both, and ones with neither. I currently work and live on an island in a developing nation with spotty, at best internet that periodically has unexplained government blocks on it, and my uploads vary from individual to moderately large batches.

For me this change has been nothing but beneficial, and even when it does make a mistake it’s not really any more work than you have to do anyway.

I get that other people may have different opinions, but I have not found this to add any appreciable amount of time to the upload process.

As an aside, you can always “select all”, and clear all names from the images in one click, you don’t have to clear names individually for each observation when there are errors. This is what I often have to do for placing image batches in their correct locations and it works just fine.

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Yes, that is what 's needed if the feature is to remain. As for Jacqui, this situation is creating work and erroneohs IDs if I don’t check every obs in a bulk upload a second time before pressing submit, as the wrong one sometimes appears a second time after I have removed it.

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Probably best to make a feature request for this, so it doesn’t get lost in this bug report.

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That suggests that you don’t check the IDs on bulk uploads normally, which seems to be an odd choice. The automated ID (image recognition) is a suggestion and it’s far from 100% correct. All ID names should, ideally, be checked before hitting “submit” regardless of how iNat gets the names into the field.

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My normal practice is to type the first few letters of Genus and species, or occasionally common name, into the blank field, check the correct one has appeared, or type more till it does. Suggestions rarely appear before I have done so, and if they do , I type over it with my ID instead, so they never get accepted.

Hence a filled ID field is one I have already ID’d, and I only have to check for empty ones before submitting.

When the auto filling in started happening I wondered why I was making so many mistaken choices.

Once I saw the forum info re the issue I became more alert for it, but unfortunately even after I have selected the correct ID in the usual way, and thought I had entered it fully, and moved on to the next obs to ID, I sometimes find - or, worse, don’t notice - an auto ID has been entered.

Also sometimes they get entered before I have had a chance to enter anything. So I have to remove it before entering the ID in the usual way.

All this takes time esp if the conection is slow.

Re the pre-submit checking, ts hard to scroll through 20 or 30 and still be able to read the text, so having to do so for ID now, in addition to all the other data to be checked, is regrettable. I can also think I am looking at a different obs if the ID is wrong…eg I just made an obs of a vine in a tree, then the next obs, of the same tree covered in the same vine, is hard to distinguish visually from the thumbnails, so I have to open the images and even zoom them to check whether the obs named for the vine is the one I identified, and described, as such.

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Since this is working as designed I’m going to close this bug report. Please feel free to start a feature request if there are specific improvements you’d like to be made to the existing functionality. Thanks!

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