I made an observation yesterday and today when I looked at it, I noticed the location was wrong. I’m pretty sure it happened this way: I took many photos with my iPhone and then later made observations from them using “Observe>Photo Library” on the iPhone app. For this particular observation, I accidentally tapped an unintended photo while scrolling down the photo list, before selecting the intended photo. After noticing the wrong photo in the list of photos, I simply pushed the “X” for it to delete it and then finished the observation. But the location is taken from the first photo, so the location used for the observation is for the one I deleted. I realize this is technically user error, but I really think there should be some sort of safeguard to prevent this from happening, as it’s not really obvious without thinking about it that you’ve created an observation with a wrong location and it’s really, really bad to get the location wrong. Opinions?
In edit mode you can choose to get data from particular photo, so you can restore a correct location if needed, but yes, it happens sometimes, but as you now know how it works it’s easy to evade the situation again.
In the reverse case, there are times when I’m in remote areas that not all my photos get properly geo referenced and I use this to select a nearby photo. I can tweak the time and location after removing the other image.
It’s certainly easy enough to work around once a user knows about it, but I do wish there was a prompt or a message that appeared when editing multi-photo observations if the photos are geotagged more than some set distance apart (say 50m apart or more), just as a little heads-up that something seems odd and to check the location and make sure it’s correct.
Yes, I can see the benefit of a prompt asking if you are sure the location is correct, but this is a process I also often use intentionally! It’s a great trick both for when you’re in remote locations and for photos taken when your phone is set to low power mode, as iPhones stop tracking location in the background when you have your phone set to this. As a result the first few photos after taking your phone out of your pocket will often have incorrect locations or just have astronomically huge accuracy circles, so I will use later photos with better location data even if they are not the photos I’m intending to upload.
Additionally, my dad has begun to use Seek and iNat and will sometimes “Seek” something and want to upload the picture to iNat later (rather than uploading through Seek because he will often forget that step at the time). Unfortunately, when a photo is taken through Seek, when it saves to your photo library it does not include location data at all (which is a feature that I think is really frustrating and would be great to change if possible). He has gotten very annoyed by this before and I showed him this trick as a workaround, and he uses it routinely.
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