Batch mobile upload not recording spatial metedata

When selecting multiple photos of the same specimen from my image gallery on my Samsung Galaxy S10e to upload the photos, the spatial metadata my phone collects doesn’t get transferred to the observations.

When I select the photos from within the app the spatial data does get transferred.

Android version 1.17.1 (390)

Step 1: Go to photo gallery. Select desired photo(s).

Step 2: Click share with iNaturalist

Step 3: Upload

For privacy purposes many photo management apps will remove coordinates from photos before sharing them with other apps. So this is not a bug but a feature of your photo management app and iNaturalist’s app can’t do anything if it’s given a photo without coordinates.

Check the settings of your photo management app (varies upon platform) and see if it has anything like “remove geo location”. You can turn it off and all photos shared by the app with any other app (iNaturalist, Facebook, etc) will retain the coordinates.

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My app settings are set to share location with iNaturalist and have been since I’ve started using the app. I just checked and my settings are still set correctly. Is it possible my photo manager updated and eliminated my ability to direct upload? If so have any other Samsung users had similar issues?

Are your photos being backed up to the cloud? In the last year or so, Android won’t share location data from gallery or photo back up apps (eg Google Photos) unless the full image is actually downloaded to your device. I’m not sure how Samsung’s gallery works.

Hi @bhall002, are you still experiencing this issue? If so, can you provide some more details about how your photos are stored? thanks!