Editing (cropping, exposure adjust) strips photo geotag metadata during uploading observation

Bug Reports
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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):

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

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

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

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.):

Step 1: Photos taken with geotag attached

Step 2: Resulting photo edited - cropped, exposure agjusted to decrease file size and improve image - in Windows Photo program and modified image saved (not as copy, as original)

Step 3: Photo uploaded to iNat as an observation, but the geotag is missing and the location has to be found manually and not as precisely

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Does the image edited with Photos still display a location in its metadata?

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Sounds like this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/android-app-observations-dont-have-location-if-the-photo-is-edited-prior-to-upload/17408

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Or this:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/cropping-pictures-leading-to-loss-of-geolocation-data-in-new-version-photos-app

I’ve been using Irfanview to crop my photos since this started happening.

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XnView is another good lightweight freeware photo editor. It also allows you to add IPTC captions to JPG files.

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This is intentional in most photo-editing software. Most of them remove all the metadata (location, camera settings, date and time, etc) by default. Some more advanced applications have a setting allowing you to keep metadata in derivative files. If you do your cropping and adjusting in the iNat app itself then the metadata should all be retained.

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I agree this is likely the same issue discussed in this thread. I’m closing this one and I reopened that thread.