Metadata from Google Photos not importing (Android)

[tiwane]

@j-k

In Google photos, if you click on a picture, go to info/properties etc to find the location of your picture on the map, if Google has indicated that location is approximate, it means that no geolocation data was embedded into the metadata for that photo when it was uploaded.

I’m not an Android user, but I’ve seen this cause some issues. It does make you think that the photo actually has GPS data embedded in it, but Google just uses all the stuff they know about you to estimate the location in Google Photos.

@j-k

if you free up space from your phone by deleting photos which have already been uploaded to Google photos (there is a function which does this in Google Photos), but you do it before all your observations have properly uploaded/synced in iNat, it seems to cause a range of problems with the observations, but I haven’t been able to identify a consistent pattern to the types of problems so far.

Sometime in the past year or so, Google made it so that unless the actual full photo is on your device (not just backed up on Google Photos or another cloud backup service with a thumbnail on your device), apps can’t access the GPS coordinates of the photo. So you have to download the photo and save it to your device in order for iNat to read the coordinates.