Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): MS Windows11
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
Step 1: Uploaded nearly 200 photo observations from my desktop. (All photos have complete metadata, date, location, etc.)
Step 2: Merged several pictures of duplicate plants
Step 3: Uploaded 104 records even though warning that there’d be no location or date. WHY?
Without screenshots or a screen recording, this will be pretty difficult to investigate.
can you replicate it again?
you use “uploaded” in a few different ways here. “Upload” usually means actually submitting the observations to iNaturalist, but it sounds like it step 1 you used it to mean that you imported photos into the web uploader. Then in step 2, you combined some of those photos?
it doesn’t look to me like there’s actually a bug here.
i don think this is quite true. as far as i can tell, your recent batch of uploaded observations came through mostly fine. there are a few observations that came through without locations (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=table&user_id=geoskimom&verifiable=false), and those look to in fact be cases where these image were probably missing metadata or lost metadata at some point in your processing. (some of these images look cropped. so it’s possible whatever program you used to crop dropped your location metadata.)
as far as messages go, if any of the observations within that batch are missing location or date, you could get a blanket message that indicates that you are missing location or dates. that message does not necessarily apply to all the observations, and if you were to look at your observations, the problematic ones would get highlighted, as shown below:
. if you continue without doing anything, the non-problematic ones will load just fine, and the problematic ones will just load without the date and/or location.
Am a little surprised about these answers as I stopped using the website uploader quite a while ago, due to the same issues (location metadata is not read out).
Creating a new observation in the app, using the very same pictures works just fine for me (this way location metadata is read out in the observation).
So does the website uploader now work properly again?
i’ve experienced problems when taking photos on my Android phone, connecting it via USB to a PC, and then trying to upload those photos from the PC using the web uploader. is that what you’re describing?
if so, the way i get those to load without issue is to copy the photos to my PC, and then upload the copies from the PC. (i assume the problem here is something related to the way the two devices and / or their OSes interact, not specifically a problem with the web uploader, but i’ve never bothered trying to really track down the problem since it’s easy to work around.)
besides this, i’ve never had any problems with metadata not loading in the web uploader.
