I don’t think you are realizing how big of an issue this is. I am seeing all sorts of photos popping up in my area that people took while traveling, uploaded later on their phone, and assumed the location data was automatic. This is leading to all sorts of incorrect posts. I’m seeing observations with mountains in the background posted in the middle of the city here in Austin, TX. This has the potential to really cause issues and ruin a lot of data. Please fix this ASAP
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I’ve stoped posting because of this
The date and time are off too
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Hopefully the issue will be resolved soon! I have a backlog of photos to post once everything’s working again!
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Thanks for the update. We just needed to know where you are at with this.
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Agree. My veg mapping is at an absolute standstill. Fingers crossed this is fixed ASAP. It’s already been a few days,
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OK, the metadata bug fix has been released, version 2.8.3 in the App Store. It’s working for me.
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Thank you for fixing the metadata issue. Are there any plans to revert the image selecting process back to the original method?
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That will take longer. The multi-photo chooser we were using is unstable on iOS 13 and was causing many crashes, so we temporarily reverted to a standard one image at a time chooser until it can be brought up to date. Once we can implement a stable multi-image chooser, we will release it in an update.
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It’s working again 
One photo at a time 
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The multi-photo chooser is vital for plant identification. Very few plants can be identified by other users from just one photo. To ID plants you need to upload at least 2-3 different photos with different plant features. Uploading multiple photos with the single-image choose is very time consuming.
You stand by the two user verification so please prioritise the multi-photo chooser implementation.
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It’s easier to transfer images to laptop and upload observations to Inat that way than to go back and forth selecting one image at a time. If you have more than two or three observations with multiple images it quickly becomes a major pain using the one-at-a-time app
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Hi Greg,
I’m the primary developer on iNat iOS. I’m the one who chose to pull the multi-photo selection. I’m also the one who initially implemented it a few years ago.
I agree that it’s a bummer when features are pulled, but please understand that I did this for a very good reason. iOS 13 deprecated a number of older developer libraries, and the third-party library we were using to do multi-photo selection was hit hard. It was causing significant amounts of instability, crashes in the app in unpredictable ways, etc. In order to bring multi-photo selection back, I’m either going to have to re-implement that whole library, or find a new third-party library. Both will take time, and are further complicated by the fact that we can’t use Swift libraries in the iOS app right now, since one of the other third-party libraries we’re using (RestKit) won’t compile with Swift. I’ve been working on removing this problematic library for a while now, but it’s slow going because we use it a ton.
So my plan is to keep working to remove Restkit, the third-party library that won’t compile with Swift, so that in the future I’ll be able to choose from the vast menu of Swift libraries that do camera/photo library picker stuff, with lots of support for multi-photo selection.
In the meantime, I can’t do anything other than ask you to be patient.
Thanks,
alex
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Just got here because I have had the same problem, which I thought little about, except I now have complaints from southern African users.
Except that the app allowed me to take lots of pictures (no warning that only one would upload!), but then only uploaded the first and gave a timeout error on the upload of any further images - I just uploaded on the web site.
Is this fixed?, or must we still be patient?, 'cos …
Still ignorant of the cause, I uploaded two observations today, one with two pictures. The app timed out again, but did load both pictures in the second observation, despite doing so.
Checking now, three photos just uploaded without any glitches. So is it fixed?
iphone6 12.4.2 inat 2.8.4 build 549
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Hi Tony,
The problem that was reported is that users can only select one photo at a time from the photo library. You can still make observations with multiple photos, you just have to choose them one at a time from the library. Annoying, but functional.
Uploading shouldn’t be affected at all. What you’re describing sounds like network issues.
Can you please make a new thread for this, with screenshots of the timeout error?
Thanks,
alex
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Just putting my name on here, so if there is an update, I’ll hear quickly.
My workaround: pick one photo, hit Next, then + to add another, then repeat and repeat as necessary. Takes slightly less time than editing to add more photos.
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I miss multi photo add to. For now, I’m just waiting to upload till I’m on my laptop, but that’s restrictive as I don’t travel with it.
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Thanks for sharing this with us, plus all the work you do! I think it can be hard on the user end to realize how delicate and complex app programming is. I miss multi-upload since I often take hundreds of phone photos while in the field and then try to scroll back through and add to the app (laptop rarely available), but I am quite content to tap a few extra buttons to make sure the metadata and app can keep working.
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Thanks for responding and providing and explanation. Having to add 3-4 photos for one Obs has been time consuming but I am getting used to it. I’ll keep logging and hope you can bring the multi-photo selection back in the future.
Thanks Greg
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From my experience there is no way transferring to PC is faster. When you are mass uploading the phone is so much quicker even with the single photo process. Just having to find the location is the biggest time waster on PC.
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No more issues. Must have been a network problem?