When uploading an observation on the website, if you drag the observation to a blank area of the screen (i.e. not another observation) you get this pop-up (error message?).
Obviously dragging here is meaningless, but it seems like the pop-up should say something like “You just did something nonsensical.”
Dragging off the window doesn’t do this. Instead, the icon zooms back to where you dragged it from.
Happens on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on Mac (which is all I tried).
You also get this blank message when you drag out a photo away from the stack of a multiple-photo observation. In this case it’s a meaningful action and it removes that photo and creates a separate observation for it. The message in this case should be something like “You have split the observation into two separate observations”. I’m posting it here because the cases seem correlated.
As well as exonie’s point about dragging a photo out of a multi-photo observation being valid, I’d like to point out that I also drag photos to “nowhere” for another reason when they’re in their own observations. Dragging a photo moves it to the end of the list, which can be helpful if you have say 30 photos you’re uploading that should be in 15 observations, but some of them end up out-of-order for some reason. I’ll drag the ones that need to be together but aren’t displayed together out so that they move to the bottom next to each other, and then I can more easily combine them (instead of having to drag photos a huge distance, which can be tricky). I hope that description made sense.
The message there is actually really cool and meaningful, but you need the special iNaturalist decoder glasses to read it. Available now for the low price of US$49.95!
In my experience this only happens (even when splitting a multi-photo obs) if you don’t see the dotted line when you release the mouse button, so technically you should only let go when you see that line, although a) it’s probably not clear enough and b) you still shouldn’t get a weird blank pop-up. I like the idea of it snapping back. I’ve filed an issue and we’ll see what we can do.