Loss of photos on rotate

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): Android

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 1.30.15 (608)

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : N/A

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: N/A

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.):

When adding new photos to an observation with the camera, the photos are not saved if the observation activity reloads in a different orientation than that in which the camera activity closed.

Below are the steps to replicate the issue.

Step 1: Turn off autorotation on your device.

Step 2: Create a new observation in iNat

Step 3: Add a new photo to the observation

Step 4: Before snapping the photo, rotate the phone 90 degrees, such that it’s orientation changes. Note that even though autorotation is turned off, the camera will ignore this and rotate anyways. This is normal and desired behavior.

Step 5: Snap a photo in this adjusted orientation.

Step 6: WITHOUT adjusting the phone’s orientation (so that is to say, keep it in the same orientation it was in during Step 5), tap the Okay button.

Step 7: You will see that the photo you have taken is not added to the observation.

1 Like

this seems to be the same thing as https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rotating-phone-during-photo-preparing-makes-photo-lost-from-observation/45714, and it might be related to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/android-app-seems-to-be-unnecessarily-reloading-information-on-observation-page-after-rotating-the-phone/14943

the photo might still be in the photo repository on your phone. so you might be able to manually add it back to the observation (or a new one).

I agree with you. I believe that the issue I have reported is identical to the first issue you have linked to. I believe that is likely related to the second issue.

Also potentially related, there appears to be a memory leak somewhere. I don’t know enough yet about that to report it, but I have noticed that you can get the app to crash by reloading some of the activities repeatedly.

I’m not able to replicate this on my Android Pixel 8. Are you able to share a screen recording of it with help@inaturalist.org?

Yes, we’ve been getting reports about this but log files don’t contain anything (it may be that the out of memory issue causes nothing to be written in the logs, unfortunately).