not sure if this helps with the problem(s) in this thread, but i noticed something while trying to reproduce the problems here, and i didn’t expect it. so i wanted to note it here, just in case it is not a known thing.
earlier i noted that some of the photos that seemed to be coming in with no metadata seemed to be cropped photos:
so i wanted to see if cropping / editing the photos was somehow stripping the metadata. (i was using the stock Google Photos app on my Pixel 3a to edit photos.) long story short, i realized that if i use the iNaturalist app to take a photo, the resulting photo is different from the photos i take in my stock Google Camera app. the iNat app photos are named something like “20200428_1855517661492482631352002”, while the stock app photos are named something like “IMG_20200427_142334”. but more significantly, when i copy the photos onto my Windows machine to look at the photo metadata, i notice that the iNat app photos have only a Date Created and Date Modified, while the stock app photos have a full set of metadata captured, including a Date Taken. i wasn’t expecting a difference in the metadata stored by photos taken in the iNat app.
it seems like when the Date Taken is missing, the iNat app may be using the Date Modified as a proxy for Date Taken. this is problematic because when i crop and save a copy of a photo taken in the iNat app, it’s the date that i made the edited copy that seems to be getting loaded as the Observed Date, not the actual date the photo was taken. (oddly, Google seems to know when the edited copy was taken because i can see it in the photo details in the Photos app, but it doesn’t seem to share that information, such as when i copy the photo to Windows and view the photo attributes.) for comparison, if i load an edited copy of a stock camera app photo, the resulting observation will show an Observed Date matching the date the photo was taken…
that’s as far as i’ve gotten with this at this point, and i’m not sure if it’ll actually lead anywhere relevant to this topic…
i thought maybe if changed the date / time on my phone when editing the iNat app photo, that somehow that might affect what gets loaded. when i shifted my phone’s system date a day forward, the resulting edited copy of the photo reflected a Date Modified that was a day ahead, and when i tried to load an observation using that photo, it simply would not load/sync. (the iNat app didn’t give me any errors though.) if i moved the system date a few hours forward but still on the same date, the resulting edited copy would load okay and reflect the future time. i thought maybe if i first loaded a blank observation and then later tried to load a future dated photo, that maybe that could confuse things, but actually in that case, the app does throw up an error message letting me know that i’m not allowed to submit an observation with an observation date after the submit date…
@peakaytea – i hope you’ll still participate in the forum and on iNaturalist even if you choose not to post further to this thread. i do appreciate your effort in trying to chase this down, and i think others do, too. if in the future you do notice a very recently uploaded observation that is missing observed date and feel so inclined, you could try asking the user to send a screenshot of what they see (and maybe even a log file) to the iNat staff (help@inaturalist.org).
