Allow a "Default Album" to Select Photos From on Mobile

Feature Requests
1

I like to upload photos from my phone in batches of ~40 photos. To do this, I’ll select the photos I want to upload in a batch and add them to my “Holding” album. This helps me have fewer photos to keep track of, and means I don’t have to scroll through the entirety of my recents album to reach the ones I want to select. This is especially important when I have a large backlog (currently about 4000 photos of it…), which means both a lot of scrolling and a high chance of accidentally passing up a photo I meant to upload.

When I go to upload photos, the iNat app always (reasonably) defaults to the recents album. I then, every time I select photos, have to switch albums and select them from my “holding” album. My request is to have an option in the settings that allows us to select a default album to show first when choosing to upload photos from the camera roll.

I have an iPhone, and I’m not totally sure how this works for the android app. I would guess it’s pretty similar, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong

2

Something mostly unrelated but maybe worth adding is that the photos in an album are sorted backwards on iNat. Most recent to oldest, whereas the default sorting method for apple photos is oldest to newest. A way to switch between those two sorting methods when uploading would also be nice

3

It defaults to recents for me, too, but it’s only a few taps to choose a different album. Thereafter the chosen album is used for the rest of the session (until the app is closed, I guess?)

So long as it only costs me three seconds a sitting, not sure I’d request taking up development time on this. If I had to reselect the album every time I’d get pretty annoyed.

4

For me, I have to re-select the album each time I go to select photos

1 Like
5

I hate that recents are choosen, I always find out it’s this recents album when photo log stops right before I find what I need, now I upload right from the album as I found it faster and there’s less complications with it.

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8

@tiwane was this thread closed by accident?

9

Considering it was closed and reopened in the span of a minute that’s what I figured P:

2 Likes
10

I thought so too, but I wanted to make sure

11

It was temporarily closed when I was testing votes: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/questions-about-voting/165/40?u=tiwane

1 Like
12

OK, this isn’t something we can do for the iOS app, I’ve removed the iOS tag from the request.

Basically, with the introduction of iOS 14, Apple started limiting apps’ access to one’s photos (which I think on balance is good) and we’re now using Apple’s own photo chooser in the app. So when you choose photos to import now, your device accesses and displays your photos, not iNaturalist. When you select the photos and tap Add, those photos are imported into iNaturalist. So iNaturalist only sees the photos you chose to import, it doesn’t access your photo library like it did before. Under this new system, iNaturalist doesn’t even know what a users album names are.

I’ll see if it’s possible in Android.

4 Likes