Description of problem: I found that many of my observations were not collecting Location Accuracy from my uploaded photos. This was brought to my attention from this thread. I had over 3,500 observations that were missing Location Accuracy data. As far as I can tell all of these were cellphone observations in areas where GPS should be freely available, so they should be fairly accurate. I have gone through and batch-added this Accuracy to ~400 of them, but I was told to create a bug report. It seems this is something that may affect many others, as there are over 66 million observations missing Location Accuracy information.
Step 1: Most of the time I take a Photo with my Camera app prior to opening iNaturalist.
Step 2: I create an observation by selecting âChoose Imageâ within the iNaturalist App. This usually imports all the important metadata; location, date, time.
Step 3: Upon uploading the observation, it can be noted that the Location Accuracy has not uploaded. I have checked the Location permissions, and âUse precise locationâ is toggled on for both the iNaturalist and Camera apps
I took a photo with an iPhone 11 (18.6) which does record GPSHPositioningError, sent the original photo to myself over email, and then imported it into the Android app and the location accuracy was added.
iPhones have been recording horizontal accuracy for location with the default camera app since iOS 11 or so. For Android, I believe most default camera apps do not record horizontal accuracy for location, although as with anything Android so much depends on the model and what kind of OS itâs running.
Ah, I had forgotten this had been mentioned previously. It seems a major oversight on the part of Android, but I have no idea how one would go about requesting to change that behaviour.
Since you said âmanyâ does that mean that some did record accuracy?
The iNat Android app itself collects an accuracy value directly from the phone when you create an observation with it. If you prefer not to take your photos from inside the iNat app, one approach would be to start the observation with a single photo taken inside the app to establish the location and accuracy value. (Maybe you donât even need to take a photo, if the app lets you create a media-less observation - I havenât tried that.) Then you can take additional photos and add them to the observation before uploading it (or any time after uploading).
Thank you for all the responses. To answer the questions above, I donât know where to see where there would be GPS Horizontal Positioning Error, though based on the other responses, this is not a feature on Android phones.
Iâm guessing for my observations that do have accuracy recorded, they would be ones where I input this manually, or for the rare occasions where I have used the app to record an observation prior to taking a photo, though I most likely wonât be doing this all the time.
I thought that this was a bug with iNaturalist, though it appears that is not the case. It also appears that it is not a problem for observations to lack accuracy, so I am not concerned. Feel free to close this topic again if it has run its course.
