GPS location wrong

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): Android REDMI NOTE 10 PRO

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 1.30.15 (608)

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: I take pictures with my phone, with the GPS tracking on

Step 2: in iNaturalist I import the pictures

Step 3: the location is there but usually wrong, close or far away from where the picture was actually taken.

if you’re taking photos outside of the iNaturalist app, i doubt this is an iNaturalist problem. look at the location recorded on the photo itself, and compare it to the observation location. chances are they match – in which case, you would just need to figure out why you’re not recording what you believe to be the proper location when taking photos. do you have bad GPS satellite reception due to buildings or tree cover? do you have some sort of energy-saving feature turned on so that locations are determined only at very long time intervals? do you have some sort of privacy feature in your OS or photo app that purposely records a low-quality location for privacy purposes? do you have a malfunctioning GPS receiver?

1 Like

thanks for the quick answer. it should indeed be a problem with my phone’s GPS… i’ll try to find out and come back here if problem is not resolved.

Another possibility is if you take a picture too fast (before the GPS can update its location) then you may get a GPS fix from your previous location on your photo.

3 Likes

This is usually the issue for me. Sometimes it takes a little while for your camera app to get your location. One option is to keep some sort of GPS track app going in the background, but that will also increase battery drain.