Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Android, iOS
App version number: Android 1.20.35 (466), iOS 3.0.6 b610
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc): N/A
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/68137111
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/68134878
Screenshots of what you are seeing : N/A
Description of problem: I can view the animated GIFs fine through a browser on PC, Android, and iPhone. However, the animated GIFs display as static images using the iNaturalist app on both Android and iPhone.
1 Like
It looks like iNaturalist developers are not planning to fix this, and are also unfortunately planning to
remove animated GIFs across the system. The reason, in addition to the fact that they are an extremely annoying hack around the fact that we don’t support video at present, is that it makes our photos a lot easier to manage if we only have a single file format, e.g. if we’re doing something like training our vision model we don’t have to add a check to make absolutely sure the file format is what we think it is and perform a conversion if not. If we want to support moving images, we should support actual video file formats. For the record, I’d love to do that, but it’s a heavy (and potential expensive) lift.
2 Likes
Unfortunate indeed. For large organisms, I can see how the importance of motion can be easy to ignore, but it can be extremely helpful when observing microbes!
4 Likes
It’s in the title.
Not sure if this is actually a bug or just not implemented yet.
Eg.
Website
iOS App
hi @thatmash - welcome to the iNat Forum and thanks for providing recordings of the issue. I merged your post to this existing bug report.
1 Like
It’s not a bug, and as noted above it’s likely we won’t support animated GIFs in the future, so I’m going to close this bug report.
