Cannot navigate between observations

Platform: iNat Website

Browser, if a website issue: Microsoft Edge

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: Cellar Spiders (Family Pholcidae) on September 6, 2025 at 01:44 PM by antimatterbee · iNaturalist

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem:

Step 1: Upload a new batch of observations.

Step 2: Try to use the left-right arrows to move between new observations.

Step 3: Find that the buttons are either grayed out, or only the left button is operable(despite there being a following observation) but takes me to the last observation I made prior to this batch.

Notes: I cannot resolve the issue by refreshing the tab, or by closing any/all tabs for the site and reopening it.

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Are all of these observations obscured? I suspect there might be a bug for those. Probaly related to our updating observation pages to API v2.

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Yes, these observations are obscured: however I have older obscured observations that do not appear to be affected. (See Phidippus arizonensis on September 1, 2025 at 02:27 PM by antimatterbee · iNaturalist) It’s just the 10 that I posted after 4 PM that seem to have this issue.

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Having the same issue on two separate laptops, two different employee accounts, both on chrome and firefox, navigation arrows are either grayed-out or not present at all, locations are obscured

What are the URLs?

Platform: iNat website

Browser: Firefox 142.0.1

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: an example of an obscured observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/313197018

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem:

  1. Upload multiple observations in an obscured location
  2. View one of my own obscured observations
  3. I cannot click on the forward and back arrows to page through to the adjacent observations

I think this has cropped up within the past month or so. While I know this is expected behavior for other people’s obscured observations to protect the location/species observed, this makes it very cumbersome to go through a lot of my own uploaded observations on the site.

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Added the above post to the existing topic.

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there are dozens, apparently every observation on my page dating back to august 29th, possibly further

This is expected behavior when someone else is viewing your obscured observations? That’s awfully inconvenient.

The reason for it as I understand it is, like, imagine that you go to a park and you take 2 pictures of very common animals, 1 picture of a very rare plant that you obscure, and 2 pictures of common mushrooms, all on the same day in the same place. If someone can use the forward and back buttons on the rare plant observation, it becomes trivial for them to see that the adjacent observations were in a particular location, and can guess that the rare plant is in that location as well.

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They can achieve the same effect by clicking on your profile and looking at the list, seeing which uploads are adjacent to the obscured one.

This is why I always tell my teams to obscure all locations from a field day regardless of species.

@tiwane this actually reminds me, theres an issue regarding a method giving the ability to determine location for SAR uploads that I discovered, it would be irresponsible for me to report it on the forums (since it would give the method to anyone viewing the forum), can I pm it to you?

I can sort of replicate. For me I see a left arrow but it skips obscured observations and shows my next unobscured observation. Either way, it’s a bug. I filed a report. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1621353-Shelob

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Please fill out a ticket: https://help.inaturalist.org/support/tickets/new

I did that a year ago for this specific issue and recived no response fyi

Ah yes, I forgot to reply to you (I’m sorry) but that has been fixed for a while. Thanks to your email.

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Yup, I noticed this too.

Should be fixed now, looking good to me.

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