While moving my pictures and audio between apps, internal storage, etc, i noticed something upsetting. I think many of us rely on our meta data to know the date, time, place, everything we need here. How can our meta be reliable if moving our photos from one place to another, even once, can remove or replace the meta with inaccurate information? I worry that every observation ive ever made could be wrong! I know im not the only one and it could mean a large majority of our observations are incorrect. How can we try to stop this from continuing? Its sad that we believe we are saving and making copies of our data, in truth we are maybe saving bits and pieces. Google has been a nightmare for me. I had to resently use google takeout to export a large amount of data from google photos. When i downloaded the zip i discovered that it saves a photo in seperate parts, the original photo, a copy of it if its edited, and the meta data. At first i was annoyed and started to look for a way to combine the info and that led to me reading up on meta data. I thought just moving photos from place to place was hard since apps dont want to play nice with each other. Apparently the only reliable way to have accurate data is to move items and then manually enter the information. I didnt notice any but if this subject has already been brought up i do apologize. Perhaps a guide to preventing meta data inaccuracy would be useful, once again if there already is one I apologize.
it sounds like the issue you’re describing is not actually related to iNaturalist. if you want help fixing / massaging metadata in files from Google Takeout, it looks like there are plenty of resources spread across the web. i would start with a simple web search or a search through GitHub.
Inaturalist isnt the cause of the problem at all, more of a victim. The problem is all the apps and systems our photos go through before we ever get it here. Google takeout is just an example of one of the issues im facing personally at the moment. But ive also moved photos through clouds for iphone, samsung, at&t, etc. Many apps and programs, like google drive, google photos, samsung gallery, Amazon photos, the list goes on. Best way ive found to spot an issue with the data is by checking the time of the photos. If i find photos have the exact same time of day on each one it means it was moved at least once. I almost wish inaturalist was the problem since they might actually address and fix the issue lol. Ill be trying the google photos takeout helper after this post. Hopefully it helps combine what i have left but that doesnt mean whats there is right either. Crazy that it takes multiple programs just to move something.