I have photos taken with a camera. I often took an iPhone photo in the same location so I know the coordinates. If I upload the camera photo and then open “Edit Location”, I can’t figure out how to type in or cut and paste the coordinates into the search box. I can zero in on the map but it is tedious and less accurate. Is there a simple trick? I have tried reformatting the coordinates in multiple ways and nothing seems to help.
Thanks
as far as i know, manually inputting coordinates in the iOS app – at least the current one, not the legacy one – is not possible. see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/manual-input-for-coordinates-on-ios-app-not-functioning/76679/2.
however, if you use the web upload screen (or the web edit or batch edit screens), it is possible.
i’m not sure if pinned locations work for the current iOS app – it wasn’t available on the old app, as far as i know – but if they are, that might be another option. (pin the location, and then use that across several observations.)
i can only comment about the web browser because that is the only way I work with uploading photos for iNat. I highly recommend that you use that route to do yours.
When I am using an iPhone (11) photo for location, I upload that photo via the web browser, along with my plant/animal images for that location. You can then select the iPhone image and as pisum suggests, pin it. You can then go back to your upload and select ALL of the related images, go over to the left box and select “edit locations” and you will be able to use the pinned location to add it to all the photos at once.
I sometimes have dozens of photos from one location so this is very convenient for me.
Sometimes (and I’m not sure why I do this), I will email myself the photo and then I will go into the map and derive coordinates. One can also look at this in the data contained in the image itself (I always forget about this until I upload something that I want to obscure and realize yikes, the precise lat/long is in the “exif” data or whatever it is called for an iPhone).
Again, I think you will want to use the web browser in your case, if you can. Very “economical” for what you are wanting to do.
one more thought is that it’s possible to keep a GPS track on your phone and then use that to geotag your photos before you upload them to iNaturalist. (and when you upload a geotagged photo, the system should use that as the location for your observation.)
most of the major camera manufacturers should have their own apps to facilitate that process, although i know it can be finicky in some cases, and i know some folks prefer to use other apps to facilitate that sort of workflow.
I also use a camera that doesn’t have GPS, so I take an iPhone shot (or back-of-camera shot) for each subject or specific locality and later transfer all camera and phone images to my MacBook. In the Photos app on my MacBook, I copy the location of the iPhone photo (Image > Location > Copy location) and assign it to the relevant camera images (Image > Assign location to _ photos). When the camera images are later uploaded to iNat from my laptop, they have the location.
I often use a camera with no GPS for my iNat photos. To avoid having to manually enter the location for each photo, I use a GPS app on my phone. It creates a file of where you walked and what time you were at each exact spot, called a GPX file.
The idea is that you synchronise your GPX track with your photos, based on the time they were taken. “You took this photo at 12:32, so you must have been at this location” (@suegar this is basically an automated version of what you do!)
The software I use:
On my Android phone : “Geo Tracker” (I’m sure there are many iPhone equivalents)
On my laptop: “GeoSetter”
This seems like a lot of steps, but it makes things so much easier, especially if you’ve taken 300 photos and weren’t taking much notice of exactly where you were walking.
Tips:
There’s a video about it here … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y55d5rRLTng
I tend to take the “good” photos with my camera and another one with my phone. Download them all to my computer. And upload both the camera photos and the phone photo at the same time. Location sorted. As long as one photo in an observation has location data, iNat is happy.
I have a few cameras without GPS. Sometimes I take several photos, and before I start walking I take a few with my phone. When I upload them to iNat, I use my phone photos as a reference for the rough location (I se the accuracy to what I feel covers where the organism is. I figure it’s “good enough”.
If I were doing this for a living, I would be a lot more methodical and accurate.
I take a picture of my camera after taking the photo if I know I wont be able to find the location later. Then I either put the camera photos onto my phone, or get the location pic onto my computer. Then when uploading the observation I include that photo initially, and it grabs the location! Then I just remove that photo before posting :)
This is a perfect setup, and it gives the best results with minimal effort.
On Android, I would recommend Mendhak’s GPSLogger (stable and very battery efficient: I let it run in the background permanently so I ALWAYS have the GPX, never drains my battery…), and on the PC, I recommend GeotagNinja, which has the advantage of transferring the accuracy taken from the GPX into iNat observations (which is information I find very important when searching for things to observe).
Thanks for suggesting that I use the web browser instead of the app. It seems like it will do what I need.
I just figured out how to do geo-tagging with my camera and uploading through the web browser seems to be working.
I need to go back to my old photos and try to use the iPhone data to edit the missing location data from the camera shots.
Thanks everyone.
I use cameras for all of my iNat observations and even though most of them them have GPS I no longer use it as I have found a more accurate methodology. I use a smartphone(Android) and use an App called GeoTracker on the phone. This creates a track of where I have been when out recording. On my Windows-11 PC I use a program called Mappero Geotagger. I download the GPX track from the phone to my PC, open it in Mappero and then drag all my pictures taken that day into the program. Click ‘Select’ and then Click ‘Save’ and all of the positional information is placed into the EXIF data on each of the photographs. Before I go out on each recording trip I make sure the TIME on my camera is synced with the phone’s time to ensure time stamps for positional information are as close as possible - this provides the greatest accuracy.
This method provides far better positional accuracy than using the in-camera GPS even on my expensive Canon DSLRs.
Hope that helps.
Cheers and good luck with your recording/observing.
Steve
I have a non-GPS camera.
I use a phone GPS app to record a track, save it as .GPX.
On my computer I feed the photos and the .GPX into GpsPrune, which will put the GPS position into the photo’s hidden data (EXIf data).
In human language, that’s called GeoReferencing.
iNat reads this.
A nice benefit of GpsPrune is that it can make a .KML that contains thumbnails of your pictures, so open that in Google Earth and have a record of where & what.
All a bit fiddly the first 3 times you do it, then a 2 minute routine to georef 200 photos.
There are tons of other apps & programs that do similar - choose your own adventure.
GpsPrune has good how-to’s, or read this.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q85u2MZ4PRkLFDi2EAbgYYux1sdOprPM/view?usp=drive_link
Just linking to this thread for reference, more examples of apps and programs to use for geotagging there: Geotagging Photos