Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : N/A
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/import_photos
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.):
When creating an observation (at least via Batch upload, haven’t tested other methods) if the photo doesn’t have EXIF tags for GPS location, then the user can search for a location in the place search box, this will search with the Google Maps Geocoding API.
Once a user selects a result the GPS coordinates are shown and are saved, the same coordinates are then returned via the API request for the observation.
However according to the Maps Service Terms at https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/maps-service-terms#3.-geocoding-api
3.4 Caching. Customer can temporarily cache latitude (lat) and longitude (lng) values from the Geocoding API for up to 30 consecutive calendar days, after which Customer must delete the cached latitude and longitude values. Customer can cache Geocoding API Place ID (place_id) values, in accordance with the Geocoding API Policies.
So you’re not allowed to store the lat/lng values longer than 30 days, the only thing you can store is the place_id.
Does iNat have some exception to this, or is something else happening that I don’t understand?