Personally, while I do do my best to get close to the subject, I rarely crop photos because it always seems to result in the location information being lost, though I have no idea why - and that’s a real pain. If I could crop photos easily while uploading, without the risk of losing metadata, I’d do it a lot more.
You can always upload a crop of the photo alongside the original so the location data is kept. If you describe your workflow for cropping photos I may be able to help, a lot of image editors have a toggle to keep metadata for instance.
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I just use Photos on Windows 10. I’ve never tried doing any serious fiddling with photo editing, so I don’t have/know any other software. (And yes, I can keep the original and save a copy, but since I’m running out of space anyway due to trillions of photos, I prefer not to do that too much… 
)
I use Photos on Windows 10 and 11 to quickly crop before posting to iNat and it doesn’t remove metadata. I just tested it again now in Windows 11 with no issues.
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How odd - because while I think it hasn’t been quite 100% of the time with me (I have a vague recollection of it working right once or maybe twice), I can virtually rely on cropped photos having no locations. I wonder what the difference is? (As I say, it puts me off doing it, so I haven’t exactly tried it a lot of times. Maybe it’s still trying to learn the ropes!)
Related Photos behavior on a Mac: I can import original photos from an SD card into Photos and they retain original metadata (from my Canon point-and-hope cameras, for instance). But when I drag-and-drop the same images from Photos onto the iNat Upload page, I get a message that the photos have been “Exported as low-quality images” and the location data (and other metadata?) is missing on those copies. Properly done, it has to be a two-stage process of exporting from Photos to my hard drive as full-sized versions with metadata, then dragging those versions onto the Upload page. I’m not sure why Apple designed the behavior in that manner, and there’s probably a Preference somewhere that I can adjust but I haven’t bothered to look into that.
some of the discussion here may be useful to you
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Split off this discussion into a new topic.
@grampianshiker what is your exact workflow here? I suspect there’s a step missing, or that you have some sort or location sharing preference turned off, but without specific details we can’t really help you further.
FWIW I was able to get this to work if I drag and dropped my photos from the Photos app into the uploader in Safari, but not Firefox. That being said, the uploader page was never designed for this workflow, so I woudn’t expect it to work. I think the fact that Safari and Photos are both Apple products is why it does for that combination. I think you need to have this turned on as well, in Photos’ Settings:
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I’m one of those who reported the problem in that old thread, and it’s been an ongoing nuisance ever since. I just tried this again using Photos on my PC, running Windows 10, and to my surprise, it is preserving the latitude and longitude fields now! (It still seems to delete an altitude field from the metadata.). Perhaps Microsoft finally has fixed the problem in a recent software update? I suppose it’s too much to hope for that they’d document that somewhere.
Update: I checked photos that I cropped yesterday, and they still lost the GPS metadata. It’s something in the Windows Update (KB5065429) that I just installed today that fixed the problem!
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I’ve personally been happy with darktable for cropping and fixing exposure - it’s free, cross platform, you can tag photos with species names, and if you enable metadata export it passes time, location, and camera data through just fine.
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I use the Gimp (on Linux), and it does not remove the time metadatum. My photos don’t have location metadata; I get them from traverse points if I’m surveying, or by looking at the map.
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I should mention: I am accessing iNat and the Upload page on Chrome (Version 140.0.7339.133)(MacOS Sequoia 15.6.1 on a laptop). I do have the “Include location information” on for sharing from Photos, but still the drag-and-drop method loses the location of images. For this action, the “titles” I give each image are also lost in the transfer. I’m finding no Setting in Photos that allows me to opt for full-sized images in a drag-and-drop action. To recap, after Exporting the same images to a folder on the hard drive then dragging the same (full-sized) images ino iNat from a Finder window retains all metadata including location, filename, title, etc. So the low quality image transfer seems to be a built-in constraint within Photos–just one more reason I dislike the app. (Don’t get me started.)
For free editing software I’ve also tried Irfanview and Faststone which were decent. With Faststone a couple times I’ve had glitches where it inverts the coordinates (i.e. switches up +/-) but otherwise it was nice because it had more editing options than Irfanview.
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My workflow is:
- From Explorer, open an image file (it opens in Photos).
- Decide whether or not to edit; if yes, edit and save either as the same name or a new file. Close Photos.
- Drag file from Explorer into the upload page on Firefox.
The only thing that varies in my workflow is whether or not I edit (crop). The location data is there if I don’t, but disappears if I do. (As I say, I have a feeling it might have kept the location data once? But it’s pretty reliable in losing it.)
I see a comment about a recent update helping, so maybe I need to try that.
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Thanks. Yeah, let us know if you’re able to update and if that works. Also might be worth looking in any settings or preferences in the app to see if any are related to metadata.
I’m terrible at getting around to doing updates, but maybe this will inspire me! I had a quick look at the settings last night and couldn’t find anything to do with metadata, but I’ll have another look.
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I finally did updates and tried cropping again. It’s still losing the location at least half the time. 
Ah well - it seemed worth a try, and I think it is right in a slightly higher percentage of cases.
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