Date/Time incorrect and unfixable

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/125273731

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

This time and date shown on the record is incorrect, however when i go in to correct it, the date and time appear correct. This is happening across multiple observations uploaded via the API

Possibly the difference between your account’s default display timezone (or the location timezone), and the timezone recorded by the camera settings? Just something to explore while you wait for a more definitive response…

What happens if you remove +00:00 from the date/time field and save the observation?

It’s not a time zone issue I don’t think as GMT and CEST are 2 hours apart, but these times are much more different

In a further development the date and time are CORRECT when looking at the observation through the app, but INCORRECT when looking at the observation on the website. There must be something wrong with how the website interprets the date format

The issue is the +00:00 that you’re appending to the times - is there a reason you’re doing that? If I add that to my observations then yes, on the website the wrong time is displayed. If I remove it, then the time is correct.

1 Like

I’m uploading via the API (pyinaturalist), and this date time format is specifed as valid int eh docs

" observation[observed_on_string]
Text representation of the date/time of the observation.
Allowed values: iNat is pretty flexible in the dates it can parse out of this value. Here are some examples

  • 2 days ago
  • January 21st, 2010
  • 2012-01-05
  • October 30, 2008 10:31PM
  • 2011-12-23T11:52:06-0500
  • July 9, 2012 7:52:39 AM ACST
  • September 27, 2012 8:09:50 AM GMT+01:00"

and just to be clear, it is pyinaturalst that is adding the “+00:00” to the string (90% sure anyway), which may well be the standard notation for date/time in python. I’m actually calling python from R