When ever I use the “Take photo” option to create an observation or add an additional photo to an observation, two separate, duplicate photos with different file names are created. If I take a photo just using the Camera app, not through the iNaturalist app, then only a single photo is created.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? It is annoying since I create a large number of observations and this has caused me to max out the storage on my phone multiple times. I ultimately end up having to delete one of the copies of each photo.
I am using iNat version 1.12.4 (363) and Android version 5.1. But I have uninstalled and reinstalled iNat a few times as well as updating Android at least once, so I have had the problem while using multiple combinations of different versions of iNat and Android, and the problem hasn’t gone away.
Can you be more specific and possibly include a screenshot? Do you mean you’re seeing additional photos in the edit observation view, or do you mean two separate duplicate photos appear in the Google Photos app or something? Sounds like the latter since you mentioned file names, but if so, what are those file names?
When you reinstall the app, do you have to sign in or are you already signed in with some of your older observations already loaded? If that’s what’s happening, you might need to uninstall anddelete your old backup from Google Drive. The bug that generally causes issues like this was causing problems in the app’s local database, so only removing that bad data will fix it. If you’re loading that same bad data from a backup, you’ll still hit that problem no matter how many times you reinstall. Of course, you might be having a different problem…
Two separate photos appear in my Gallery app. Only a single photo appears in the edit observation view. I am having a hard time figuring out which of the two photos actually gets uploaded to iNat since the photo info on the website doesn’t seem to display the original filename. Here are two screen shots of duplicate photos with different filenames:
One of those photos should be the last photo in this observation (but they are apparently duplicates with the same attributes other than the filename):
When I reinstalled iNat, I was not already signed in. I had to re-sign in and no observations were already uploaded. I had to wait for my latest 100 onsevations to load. I have never backed up my photos to Google Drive or any other similar service as far as I know.
Update: The files beginning with “IMG” are the ones created by my Camera app. The duplicate photo created when I take a photo through the iNat app is the one that does not begin with “IMG”.
Your Camera app saves IMG_20190828_190309657 to your Gallery app
Your Camera app bounces you back to the iNaturalist app with the new photo data
iNaturalist saves 20190828_190322-1470212479 to your Gallery
The iNat Android app always relies on an external camera app to take pictures, so we can’t control what that app does. In our experience, most camera apps (e.g. Google Camera) do not save a photo to the gallery when responding to a request from another app like this, but perhaps some do. If that’s the case… I think the only remedies would be to make our own internal camera (our experience doing this with Seek suggests this is hard and probably never going to be as good as the default camera app on most phones), or maybe make saving photos to your gallery optional.
Either way, would it be possible to test my theory by disassociating iNat from your default camera app, installing another camera (like Open Camera), and then when you take a photo in the iNat app, choose to use that other camera app and see if the same thing happens?
