I just checked one of my obscured observations. Although it’s obscured, when I click on the “i” button to go to https://www.inaturalist.org/photos, I can see the photo’s GPS location. Is this just because it’s my own observation?
Try to look my observations, i can see their gps in exif too. But i dont think you’ll be able to see my photos gps..
Okay, thanks, I just checked your obscured observations and didn’t see any GPS coordinates in the EXIF.
I’d be OK with adding an option on a photo page for hiding Location data for a specific photo, just like there are tools on photo pages for the observer to rotate the photo or change its license. I would not be for a global preference for hiding EXIF.
Yes they have GPS on exif, but i dont think anyone other than me can see them.
If you use some common sense, either the observation is PUBLIC and it makes no sense to hide EXIF geolocation since the rules ask you to geolocate your observation, or you make it obscured, and EXIF metadata are already hidden.
So we are back to the bad habit of “fudging” the location, which is unscientific and should not be done.
The only way to solve all these questions, is to have a 2nd “obscure” option with a smaller diameter/area than dozens of kilometers.
The current option makes sense in some cases, but a smaller area would also often make sense (especially if it respect the land vs marine environment, also country and states limits, but this would be much less of an issue with a 1km radius, for example), so I believe this would be the correct way to proceed, both “obscure” levels would hide EXIF data (and so geolocation of course.)