This doesn’t work as well as it used to. Some names are not extracted at all, e.g. African Black Eagle now gives me a blank species, where it used to autofill the name.
The one that drives me absolutely crazy is “canary”. It doesn’t matter what English vernacular name I use for my canaries, they all get entered as Serinus canaria domesticus. (I will try with scientific names from now on.} I have checked all the canary names for my area, including Streakyheaded, Whitethroated and Blackheaded, and the names I use are all present and correct for the correct species, and not present in the domestic canary lexicon.
So then I started using the Afrikaans names in my image titles. Worked for a couple days and now they all get auto-entered as Crithagra gularis. Once again I have checked the Afrikaans names, and they are all correct in the lexicons.
iNat devs, are there code change shenanigans going on in the background?
As the original is for photo names - I’ll mention that it does not work at all for sound files. I can call the sound file what ever I want - it still comes up as a blank I cannot remember it extracting anything at all ever. What would be nice is if the date and time can also be extracted from this kind of filename: Bokmakierie_180726_1640
Yes, sound files have never autofilled any of the fields. I batch rename all my original photos and videos with date–time and then add the title at the end when I process them in Darktable. So my video names are e.g. 2026-06-12–10.12.56 bokmakierie.mov.
Then I extract the audio from the videos in Audacity and save as mp3 or wav (with the same name as the original video, just different extension). I think this strips the date-time metadata. But my file names show when I upload, so it’s easy to just type them into the date-time, and add the species.
So, yes, sound files don’t fill any fields. But if you batch rename your photos when you load them on your computer, then you’ve got reference. e.g.
If you’re doing this on a phone, then I cannot help at all. Phones are fiddly and flummox me ;-)
Oh, something other people do is take a photo of anything at the same time they took the recording. Upload photo and recording. Combine photo and recording (this fills in date-time, and locality if you have gps turned on), delete photo.
Anyway, this has almost immediately gone off topic…
i think you should always be able to find by scientific name, but if the primary common name has characters like hyphens or maybe apostrophes, then the algorithm won’t find the taxon.
are you sure? looks to me like the primary common name of African Black Eagle is Verreaux’s Eagle (apostrophe), and the primary common name of Whitethroated Canary is White-throated Canary (hyphen).
right, but what i’m getting at is maybe when the primary common name has characters like those, you get problems regardless. you can try switching the order to do a test.
Hmm. I hear you. Though the primary common name for USA is not necessarily the primary for southern Africa. e.g. primary name in sA is African Black Eagle. Also the Afrikaans names used to work flawlessly, probably because there’s usually only one per species (of bird (plants are a different story)). And having said that, I find I don’t have an autofill problem with plant names in English or Afrikaans. Birds are the big problem. Mammals, reptiles, insects - no major issues.
