it looks like this and similar threads reporting long upload times on the web upload screen (ex. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/loading-metadata-taking-4-6-minutes-for-one-picture-size-3-8-mb/51382) are basically the successors to threads reporting photos failing to load (ex. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/pictures-upload-failing-when-creating-a-new-observation-via-web-browser/34497) since the functionality to retry photo uploads was implemented last year.
for folks looking for possible solutions to the problems, it may be worth looking at those other threads, and probably the older pre-retry threads should be closed if the discussion for these kinds of problems is going to be continued on this thread.