Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: All platforms
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: N/A
Description of need:
When there is a need to manually change the date of an observation, under virtually no circumstances is the time of the observation correct. Dates generally need to be changed because a camera had the wrong date/time setting when the photograph was taken, or because a photo was taken of a collected specimen after it had been collected from the wild. If the date automatically imported from a photo was incorrect, there is nearly a 100% chance that the time imported was incorrect as well. Most users only bother to change the date, and defaulting to no change in time when date is changed results in many incorrect times being reported in observations.
Feature request details:
When submitting an observation on the app or the website, if I change the date of the observation manually, I would like the time of the observation to disappear, i.e. default to “no time given” rather than defaulting to keeping the time that iNat previously imported from the photo’s metadata. I cannot think of any situation in which the date of a photo needs to be manually edited to reflect the correct date of the observation, but the time of the observation is accurately reflected by the photo’s metadata. Yet if I edit a photograph’s date when uploading it, the time reflected in the photo’s metadata remains unless I manually remove it. This results in many inaccurate observation times being uploaded. If someone needs to manually change the observation’s date from what the photo’s metadata says, the time should disappear. This would prevent inaccurate times from being carelessly uploaded with observations. (I am guilty of leaving these inaccurate times on observations myself, because it is a hassle to remove them, and times are so rarely used on iNat.)
And me, too. @tiwane: Did something happen to reduce the number of votes available to Forum users? It seems surprising that so many of us are encountering this at the same time. Apparently I have voted in favor of 69 feature requests. It seems strange that I would have 69 votes and not 70, 75 or 100.
Edited to add… it also seems in conflict with this statement:
Something I’ve noticed when uploading photos with no date and time (digital copies from a disposable camera) is that once I pick a date for the photo iNaturalist automatically assigns the current time displayed on my computer.
If the proposed change is made, it may also be worth considering a similar adjustment of not including the current time when manually adding a date.
Thank you for this.
Happened to me when I started with iNat and posted some older but nevertheless valid observations. Some photos were coming from different cameras, even different computers, hard discs, and sometimes metadata were lost. Some came from prints, pre-digital era. I knew where the photo was taken, and the year and month, but sometimes not the exact day and time.
For example a photo of a mountain gorilla in Kongo from 1992. I found the date of the day in my travel diary but not the time. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/146264859
So I should have marked these photos with a note like, ‘date/time estimated’ …
I agree, and I would think this would be an easy thing to fix. I could be wrong about that, of course. If it’s really hard to fix, do other things first; I feel lucky to have the right date. It is a shame to mislead any researchers working on the time of day things happen, though.
The one concern I have is that most users probably would not remember what time they photographed it, and it would lead to some users not posting observations, some users posting casual observations, and many users just making up a fake time. I study pollinators using iNat data, and time of day info would be so great to have, but it’s simply not something iNaturalist is situated to handle, given that most users are uploading for personal reasons rather than for creating useful research data.
I’m a little confused - why do you think this would discourage users adding observations or making up fake times?
I also use time data and realize that a fair amount is missing/not reliable, but I don’t think there’s any one solution that will fix this. I do think this could reduce some clearly erroneous time data entering the system.
Because if, when you change the date, it leaves the time field blank, requiring you to manually input a time, the majority of users will be faced with the choice of consciously entering false information, uploading a casual observation, or not uploading at all.
Edit: the reason for this is because few users can remember down to the hour, much less minute, when they took a photo, especially if more than a day has passed between photography and uploading
I downloaded one of my own photos from the internet, without the original metadata, and confirmed that time is a required field, at least in the app. If I remember the date, but not the time, I am already required to make something up. I would probably not post such an observation. Obviously it’s better to have a photo with the metadata attached, but not all users have that luxury, especially inexperienced users. My point is that increasing the number of instances where a user would have to consciously lie to submit an observation has some drawbacks.
Time definitely is not required when using a browser. I’ve seen plenty of date only observations and used this myself occasionally. I would guess that most, but not all, observation editing probably happens in the browser (and certainly this is the case for bulk editing).
I guess with the new app coming out, it would be good to allow date only entry if that is possible.
Thanks @thebeachcomber and @cthawley, that clears things up for me. So it seems that this feature request would have no impact on the app, until the app allows for a blank time field, in which case the feature request should also be rolled out to the app.
