I often crop or rotate phone photos in my phone photo album before I upload them into iNat. By default, iNat sorts them by date/time modified, which separates photos I have edited from ones that I haven’t, if I took more than one photo. It is possible to manually change the sort order each time you add a photo, but that gets tedious with a lot of obsevations. Does anyone know a way to change the default “sort by” from “modified: newest first” to “file name (Z to A),” which will keep all the photos together? Thanks for any hints!
Hi, welcome to the forum! Not quite sure if this answers your question, but - when you drag and drop a set of photos into the web uploader, it should retain the order that they are sorted in the folder on your computer. So if you have a set of photos:
a.jpg
b.jpg
c.jpg
Make your folder sorted by filename, select all three, click and drag (make sure you click and drag from “a.jpg” and not one of the other files), and they should appear in that order in the web uploader.
There isn’t a way to autosort the photos after they’ve been uploaded, they have to be manually dragged around. (Or if you are combining multiple photos into a single observation, you can select multiple “cards” and then click “Combine”.) Here’s a related feature request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/sort-by-date-or-file-name-during-upload/1949/4
Thanks! Doesn’t really solve the problem I’m having in the Android app, though I think I can make this work by moving phone photos to my computer before putting them into iNat. I appreciate the help!
Matt
Oof, missed the actual title of the topic, haha :)
1 Like
Looks like when I use a 3rd party app to share photos to the iNat app (Astro file manager), it retains the order that I selected the photos. When I use the default Google Photos app photo browser (on a Pixel 5) it sorts by file date modified.
In the iNat app, after you select the plus sign to add a new image, it takes you to the Camera screen and shows a series of images. On that screen, you can change the sort order by clicking the three dots at the upper right hand corner of the screen and selecting sort order.
Alternatively, I find it easy to crop or rotate images within the iNat app after uploading the image using the built-in image editing capabilities.
1 Like
i think mpelikan already knows this, based on the comments in the original post:
as far as i can tell, there’s not a way to change the default sort by method here, except by maybe coding the app to specify a particular sort when opening up the media store browser. (if there’s not a better answer, you might be able to initiate that process through a feature request.)
Hi Matt! You may want to try sharing via third party app, which will generally order them as you have selected them in the observation. Also, if you haven’t tried it already, the iNat photo editing tools are quite good for simple edits. For my workflow I use the default photo app (Google Photos) to select the photos, share all the photos for a single observation to iNat, then crop, rotate, and reorder as needed.
Thanks. Yeah, the problem is that in the Android app, iNat imposes its own default order regardless of how the photos are sorted in the Android folder. And overriding that order needs to be done for every photo that has been edited. It looks like Nate Marchessault has some useful suggestions below; in the meantime, for the bioblitz stuff I’m working on right now, I moved the photos to my computer and am uploading them via the full website, which always works fine.
1 Like
Good tip. Perhaps amazingly, I haven’t yet run across iNat’s own photo editing capabilty.
2 Likes
If you select a photo you can hit the button that says “make 1st” and it makes it the first photo in the observation. Perhaps not the best solution as if you want to move multiple photos around you have to do some gymnastics, but if you only have 2 or 3 images it’s pretty useful.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.