I have a handful of pictures I took at The Louisville Zoo in Kentucky over the years, and all of these pictures have location metadata. I uploaded them all to iNaturalist (and marked them as captive) and each one was listed as being at The Louisville Zoo.
However, as soon as I refreshed my observation list, a handful of them reverted to just “Kentucky,” and were no longer listed as being at the Zoo. For these, I re-entered the correct address, saved them, and that seemed to fix it until I refreshed again, and then the same four reverted to just being listed as Kentucky again.
I even tried deleting those problem entries and reuploading them without any lucky.
Any idea why this is happening? It’s driving me crazy.
For your ones where a pin has ‘moved’, that’s because your observations are of threatened species, e.g. your lion and tamarind. On iNat, any species which have a conservation status of near threatened or above typically have their location automatically obscured through randomly scrambling the coordinates into a ~0.2 x 0.2 degree box. This is to prevent e.g. poaching by searching for threatened species and then going to the location where people saw them.
Also, the place name for each observation is often somewhat arbitrary, and is usually set by Google Maps
The ones marked Kentucky only have obscured Geo-location co-ordinates. Check geoprivacy settings. Sometimes it is obscured automatically to protect sensitive sites/species.
Same thing - that cactus species is globally endangered, so its location is obscured.
Also, it might be wise to check the permits of anyone selling cacti at a farmers market - there’s a lot of illegal trade in cacti.