Platform(s): Website Description of need: When uploading observations via the iNaturalist website on a slow connection, the process often stalls on “loading metadata”. For some users, this appears to be unnecessary overhead: not all uploads actually contain relevant metadata. For example, I frequ…

I’m curious, why screenshots and not the photo itself? Doesn’t having the metadata in the photo make the upload page so much faster? What’s your photo flow?

[image] sbushes: the process often stalls on “loading metadata” as far as i can tell, this is just a generic message that tells you the image is being uploaded and not actually a reflection of which particular part of the upload process is happening at the time.

The metadata is a pretty small proportion of the photo data (up to 15%ish, unless someone is doing something weird, but often less as file sizes get larger). I don’t think there would be major performance gains here. If a user really needed to save the bandwidth, they could strip metadata in their p…

I would agree. Maybe a feature request to change this to “uploading file” or perhaps have both and loading metada appear first as that appears to be the sequence?

[image] tiwane: I’m curious, why screenshots and not the photo itself? Doesn’t having the metadata in the photo make the upload page so much faster? What’s your photo flow? Re: workflow I usually keep files on my SD card, open them in Preview and then take crops as screenshots. It keeps the…

If you already have gotten rid of most metadata, then any performance gains would presumably be even smaller (a couple percent file size?). If you google, you can find many tools (eg exiftool) which will allow you to strip metadata that can be run on batches of files. I don’t think this: [image…

[image] sbushes: sometimes if the internet cuts out mid upload, it will have 50 photos, but a few will be stuck loading metadata and I have to delete them if the page is actually responding to you and hasn’t frozen altogether, then you’re probably making things harder for yourself by deleting…

[image] pisum: if the page is actually responding to you and hasn’t frozen altogether, then you’re probably making things harder for yourself by deleting photos in the process of uploading not very important perhaps, but I think I didn’t explain this instance well this is the only way to upl…

[image] sbushes: after an upload where it gets interrupted because the internet cuts out, it will hang when I go to upload,…saying its uploaded 30 out of 31… and never complete next time this happens, look to see if there’s actually any activity happening. look for internet activity at your O…

[image] pisum: i just tried throttling my connection and then cutting it altogether during an upload (where i’ve clicked on the green submit button), and i can’t replicate a situation where the screen just seems to hang. instead, what i see is that the active upload process fails immediately aft…

Addressing "loading metadata" hangs for low bandwidth users

Feature Requests

caththalictroides September 1, 2025, 2:30pm 16

Thanks! (and thank you for acknowledging the larger issue)

Topic		Replies	Views
Rename "Loading Metadata" Feature Requests	12	1665	August 31, 2025
Metadata loading suddenly very slow Bug Reports uploader	21	1348	May 23, 2024
Standalone Uploader Feature Requests	23	2233	April 5, 2019
Stuck at "Loading metadata" Bug Reports	3	514	August 19, 2020
Am I doing something wrong? (Website uploader does not grab date/location info) General web , question , ios-classic-app	31	2241	May 9, 2021

Addressing "loading metadata" hangs for low bandwidth users

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