Location title issue

[jwidness]

I’m pretty sure this is a Google error, not an iNat error.

@kueda

The description you see under the map on the observation detail pages can get set by a variety of means, i.e. it is not meant to be consistent or under the system’s control. In fact, the observer can edit it to be whatever they want. We generally refer to this text as the “Locality Notes” or the place_guess (that’s it’s name in the database). Here are the ways it gets set automatically based on the software we have written:

1. On the website, using the Uploader, searching for a place by name or clicking the map will populate the Locality Notes using Google Places Autocomplete API (search) or the Google Geocoding API (click) (the user can also change them manually at this point)
2. If you submit an observation and the Locality Notes are blank, we will attempt to fill them out using the coordinates, precision, and iNat places that contain those coordinates.
3. The Android app works similarly to the website and uses basically the same Google-based methods of turning coordinates and searches into place names

That’s a very long way of saying that if you don’t like the Locality Notes you’re seeing, it’s probably because Google or Apple didn’t do a great job of turning coordinates into a place name. We have tried to work around those errors by ignoring address-level information from Google and Apple.