The observation editing dialog on the web seems very clumsy to me. I normally only edit the photos and their order only from the Android app.
Today I found out, actually an identifier found out, that one of my observation has photos of two different similar Campanulas taken a few minutes apart. They should have been splitted.
I know I could make a duplicate observation, but I did not know if deleting a photo in one of the duplicates would keep it in the other.
I first synced the metadata to photo 2, which suited the IDs.
Then I tried to download photo 1. I managed to get the “original” displayed but after saving the EXIF was empty. How does one download the original with the metadata displayed on the web of the photo?
In the process of trying I also selected photo 1 and unselected photos 2 and 3.
After I clicked on save, photos 2 and 3 were deleted (I do not have the originals) but the observation metadata were synced to the deleted photo 2. No warning was displayed.
What is the right way of splitting the observation and not losing any photos with their metadata? How to download a photo with its metadata?
When you make a duplicate observation, edits to it have no impact at all on the “original” observation. Clicking “Duplicate” and then de-selecting the photos you don’t want in the new observation on the duplicate screen will accomplish what you’re trying to do without needing to download or re-upload anything.
What are you referring to here? If the “Sync?” link below the photo on an observation detail page, that refers to syncing metadata the other way around, from the photo to the observation.
iNaturalist strips the metadata from photo image files, so photos downloaded from iNat won’t have that information attached, sorry.
Thank you. I think it is not necessary to do anything serious in this case. They were two details without the whole view of the plant. And a common species. The occurence had been logged in another database, so this one is not worth too much effort to recover.
Interesting bit: The two other photos remained in the phone-cached version of the observation. I tried to push it to the server by making an edit to it. But after a sync, the two photos are gone also from the phone.
But fortunately it is not a big loss in this case.
this is not possible. the image files loaded to iNaturalist are stripped of most of their metadata. the metadata is captured only in the system as part of a photo record that you can view on the website when you click to see more information about a particular photo in the observation detail screen.
you could scrape that metadata and add it back to your downloaded image file, but you’d probably have to write you own code to do that. i’m not aware of anyone having written anything that handles that sort of thing.
when you duplicate in the website, the new observation will share the same photo record (and therefore the same image file) as the original observation. in other words, that photo record will be linked to both observations. if you delete the photo record, it will be removed from both observations. however, if you remove the photo from an observation, it will be removed only from that observation. note that once a photo has been removed from all linked observations (and other similar uses, such as a taxon photo), though, it will be deleted.
when you duplicate in the Android app, the new observation will get an entirely new photo record (and image file). so your new and old observations will have entirely different photos, even if they display the same thing. i believe the photo records in the new observation will also lack most of the metadata that you see in the photo records of the original observation.
I see. The last thing I probably could have done to save the photos myself was making a duplicate in the Android app before it was synced with the web. Trying to edit the cashed observation was fruitless.