this thread is probably just a continuation of https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/curiously-variable-inferred-location/34937 and should probably be merged with that one.
you’re describing something that is probably the net effect of 2 different quirks in the system:
- the boundaries of the administrative places in iNat come from GADM and are sometimes inaccurate or imprecise. so to the extent that you see bad encompassing places after upload and occasional bad location descriptions during upload, it’s related to bad (imperfect?) boundaries loaded in the system.
- there seem to be two possible paths for loading metadata in the web upload page. one will load based on Google reverse geocoding, and the other is based in the administrative boundaries loaded in iNat. i’ve never looked deeply into why this happens exactly, but this is my description of that: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rename-loading-metadata/2826/7.
for what it’s worth, i don’t know if these would be considered bugs. the boundaries loaded in the system were probably just the best available information at the time, and the alternate path for location description lookup might be a fallback for when reverse geocoding via Google fails.