The process of removing a photo from an observation is not clear.
I do not know how important it is to iNat to have a cleaner database. By error I uploaded an unrelated photo to an observation and had a very hard time learning how to remove it. (Thank you, @ schoenitz, for teaching me)
Under the “Add media” and “Add photo”, one must uncheck the photo to be deleted and then save the save the observation.
Changing the wording at the top or bottom would make this more clear to the user.
From (top) " Selected photos" to Selected photos are Saved"
or (bottom) “Select One or More Photos” to “Select Photos to Keep”
would be more helpful to people like myself.
I agree. It is currently very confusing. As it is so confusing, this could be part of why there are lots of observations with multiple taxa. How to remove a photo should be made obvious. No one should have to try to search forums to figure out how to do it.
Changing “Add media” to “Add or remove media” would help. It’s a huge issue that it says add and not remove. As there are “add media” and “add sounds” tabs, adding the obviously missing “remove media” tab would possibly help as it could allow wording of the “add media” tab to be consistent with adding and “remove media” consistent with removing. Whatever is done, it should make both adding and removing media intuitive. If it isn’t intuitive, which it definitely isn’t right now, there should be an obvious link to clear instructions from the observation editing page.
I am a pretty experienced user and also had trouble doing this. Trying to explain the process via comments is very frustrating and rarely results in pics being removed, likely at least in part because it is pretty counterintuitive.
Synch is synchronizing the metadata from that one pic, if there’s no location in it you will loose it on observation also, but if you need an exact time of it or location is present it’s useful. It works on on photo where you clicked it.
I agree it should be improved, it’s confusing. I think the reason it hasn’t changed yet is becuase we’d prefer to do it as part of a total redesign of this ancient page (it’s barely changed since 2008), rather than tacking it on somewhere.
But that might take a while so I’d support an interim change. Maybe change that section to “Manage Media”, change the tabs to Photos and Sounds and change “Sync?” to “Remove”?
I’m not sure which use of “sync” you’re referring to here, but the reason we use “sync” here:
is because a photo can be associated with multiple observations. So there isn’t a delete option here. For example, these two observations of mine (here and here) use the exact same photo. If I deleted the photo, both observations would lose the photo. Thus we use “sync” - you’re deciding whether or not the photo should be associated with the observation you’re editing. But it’s an unexpected word for this action (I think chosen mostly because it’s short).
Yes, but SYNCH is scary to users such as I. Which will be considered the source of metadata. The text: “Are you sure you want to sync this observation’s data with this photo? You will lose changes you’ve made to this form, but you will be able to revert to your saved copy.” does not really help me either.
I’ll just leave things as they are (possibly with a comment about my error) rather than take the chance of ruining something.
Interesting, and definitely confusing.
I’d always assumed it meant sync the observation to the photo metadata and therefore “overwrite the observation’s ‘date observed’ and ‘map coordinates’ with the values in the photo(s)'s metadata”.
