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): Website
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Firebox
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
I was having trouble uploading photos to iNaturalist. Something was running VERY slow. I had to shut off the machine (control-alt-delete) and start the uploading process again. It remained slow, but at least it happened.
The observations have the right latitude/longitude and are mapping to the right place, but the verbal description of the location is “17780 Soubise, France.” I used “batch edit” to try to update the latilongs, but it made no difference. Given that the mapping is OK, this is a minor problem, perhaps not worth fixing. It is annoying.
Note that this happened for all 18 observations that uploaded together, all from the same place and location.
How did you choose locations - it sounds like you selected a bunch of cards and added the same location to all of them? And in the location chooser, how did you get the location?
You have to change the text in the location box, but don’t press return. Just click on Apply and the name will be applied to all of the observations in the batch:
Hello, i had the same problem today. Am also from France, also tried to edit a location, that i has miswritten by batch, i tried to change the locations individually for each observation, i couldn’t.
It’s a bit confusing, sorry. When you originally entered a location (on the upload page, I assume), iNaturalist used Google Maps to add a “locality note” - a name they associate with those coordinates. The locality note sticks to the observation and is independent from its location after the observation has been submitted. So unless you manually edit the text of the locality note, it won’t change. Changing the location of an existing observation doesn’t change the locality note, you need to enter it as text if you edit or batch edit observations.
As to how the wrong locality note was attached to the observations, I can’t really say unless we can replicate exactly how it happened. So what we would need is a step by step, detailed account (including screenshots or a screen recording) of how you add locations to your observations. Otherwise it’s a lot of guessing.
Tiwane wrote: “The locality note sticks to the observation and is independent from its location after the observation has been submitted.”
I think this helps me figure it out, well enough for me anyway.
When I uploaded these things, the connection was acting very slow. After entering the latilong, I had to interrupt the process and restart the compute. Did I enter the latilong wrong? Was it messed up by whatever was going wrong with the connection? We’ll never know. But at that time the computer selected the location in France. After I restarted and re-entered the latilong, apparently correctly, the computer stuck with the location in France for the label, but not for the latilong.
I have now batch edited these observations to change the name of the location to “base of Saddle Mt. Road” and that change has worked. So this is all OK now.
