A recent struggle has made me aware of some issues with how metadata changes and thought it needed discussed. I dont know how many of you use the metadata on your photos to keep track of its details. I personally use a phone and cloud for my photos. A warning for those unaware but moving your photos around often destroys the metadata. It leads to incorrect information or none at all. Ive lost thousands of photos and/or information of photos to this. It worries me that many of us could be using the wrong information because we trust the details on our photos. Am i the only one having trouble with this? How do yall keep your stuff together and correct? Should someone make a tutorial or something to help others from having the same loss? This has been a painful experience for me and i really want to keep other people from going through it. It hurts us and it hurts our observations reliability.
The time is the only useful metadatum in my photos, and my sound files have none unless you count the file name, which is the time of start. I’ve found that the Gimp preserves the time.
If the metadata is important to me, then I store my photos in a folder with date and place in the title or leave a text file of notes in the folder with the photos.
Metadata are absolutely fundamental to how I store my photos. I add geotagging, location information, species name and family and other possibly interesting keywords to each photo as they are stored and this lets me search my archive in numerous different ways. However, as I know it can be easy to mess with metadata, I also add the name of the species and date the photo was taken to the name of the image and my folder structure is based on taxonomy. Am I a bit obsessed? Very probably, but it’s stood me in good stead many times and I find being able to give order to at least this minor level of chaos extremely satisfying. Strangely, I also find it fun. Not sure what that says about me, but I’m OK with that… a long as my photo archive is in order 
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My photos are arranged by date and destination - then I rely on my iNat obs for location for each photo (I don’t have GPS and have to ’walk the satellite view’) Info is either in iNat notes, or on my blog posts (blame an iNat ID obsession for missing 2025 altogether - maybe I will do a seasonal catch up next year?) Great Southern Bioblitz 2021 user-friendly and searchable with links back to iNat.
But my hiking companion organises her photos by taxonomy. Different strokes for different folks.
I agree: metadata is essential. Any observation/picture that does not have exact time + real coordinates + location accuracy is useless in my opinion.
I have a poor memory and rely a lot on GPS to locate and date/time my observations. I have a 24/7 GPS logger running on my smartphone (which I chose principally for the accuracy of its GPS chipset)
For the geolocation of the pictures, they are first geolocated in-camera (OM system app running on the smartphone linked to the camera via bluetooth) then I use GeotagNinja on the computer to verify and complete geotags (the devs were kind enough to add the management of accuracy in a way that iNat sees it.
Yes I am a geotagging nerd 
The only metadata items I use are the timestamp and orientation. My photos are organised by date/time. I use an external GPS tracker and save its files separately. All other information is stored in a database, using the timestamp as an identifier - although that requires careful handling to ensure it’s always unique.
Most standard metadata timestamps are only accurate to the nearest second, but cameras can often take photos more quickly than that when in burst mode. Rather than using millisecond accuracy, though, the camera maintains a temporary count during burst mode that is then recorded as a separate image number in the metadata. This means it’s possible for several photos to have almost identical metadata, with the image number being the only obvious difference between them. Needless to say, it’s quite important to be aware of this if the timestamp is being used to create the photo’s filename, as it’s quite easy to overwrite files that happen to have the same date/time recorded in the metatdata.
Other than the filename, I never modify the original photos in any way. When I upload observations, I create a cropped copy with cloned metadata from the original and then add the GPS data to that. If the original photo didn’t have the orientation recorded in the metadata, I set a default value as well, since some applications get confused if it isn’t there.
I had a set of bird photos I took while recovering from a head injury. I remembered taking them in a particular park in Wisconsin, but an iNat identifier pointed out that they were actually taken in California. I bought a camera with a built in GPS so I would not need to remember where my photos were taken.
Do you have an example of this that’s affected you? “Moving photos around” can mean a lot of different things.
A lot of places like Facebook and twitter automatically remove location and author data. Others like Photobucket MAY remove location data. iCloud MAY remove metadata but you can control the process if you read up on it. Lightroom provides the option of exporting location data but by default, I think, it removes location data when you export a file in either raw or jpeg. I’ve had to re-export photos in the past after updating the app and losing my preferences though I think they fixed that.
It is always best to check your photo information when transferring or modifying a file so you don’t waste time having to redo the process. Also saving originals and working from copies is the best way to make sure you don’t do unintended things permanently.
I feel like Im probably alone on this one
as 70% of my observations come from the same area and also that I upload through the web browser and my camera doesn’t have geotagging and nor do I have the space for an application on my phone , I manually put location and date for all observations, though my camera does record time accurately so that’s the only metadata I get when I transfer pics
When uploading from my phone I have to manually enter time as well :)
My photo collection across a variety of subjects spans terabytes of disk space. It is therefore not wise to stress my memory when interpreting it.
Even with a high end camera and a battery that can carry the load of continuous GPS activity, I find that the recording of locality data in my photos is contingent on the availability of satellites and (presumably) the extent to which the local mountains interfere with their signals. I often have to interpolate manual locations for images where GPS faded out, which can be compromised by inaccuracies in both the neighbouring GPS readings and my memory of the sequence of events. Time should be much easier than place in theory, but again accuracy can drift over the passing months, and it surprises me how often I forget to adjust for daylight saving time. I always keep the raw image files and I have never been tempted to squeeze out the metadata to save space, even on the skimpier laptops of 10 years ago. But the benefits of this approach are not absolute.