I just discussed this with our Android developer. Here is why we download a save a local copy.
- We basically save a local copy of it, to the app’s cache directory, since we need to resize it before uploading it.
- When you scroll through the obs list, we can either show online photos (=already uploaded) or local photos. Linking to Google Photos in the obs list, while you scroll, doesn’t work. We save those cached photos both for speed (loads faster) and for making them available while you’re offline.
And as mentioned in your other topic, iNaturalist uploads the photo (or a resized version, at least) on our servers. Otherwise, if the photo is deleted from Google Photos, it won’t be viewable on iNaturalist. This is what happened with our previous Flickr importer many years ago.
As for the location metadata issue with Google Photos, I assure you this something we looked into, because it’s certainly not ideal. I just did re-testing, and the only way to get location data from a photo in Google Photos is to:
- Tap on “Save to device”.
- Within Google Photos, share the photo to iNaturalist.