New iNat camera mode stores wrong format in Apple Photos gallery

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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): iOS

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 1.0.0 (159)

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.):

This may relate to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/app-says-date-time-location-are-missing-and-reporting-an-incorrect-time/64116/1, but I don’t understand that discussion so I’m trying again here.

With “classic,” if I used the iNaturalist camera-observation mode to take a photo, it would also save the image in my gallery on my Photos app as a time-stamped, geotagged image with .jpg extension. That was fine.

Now, with the new iNaturalist app for iOS, if I use the camera mode (either camera or CV-assisted camera), it saves the image to the gallery in Photos app as a non-geotagged MUCH larger image (I think it’s a version of RAW) with a .jpg extension.

This is not acceptable! I need to have the camera save, on Photos, the tagged, more compact version. I thought this might be just me, but a colleague told me she has the same problem.

Can you fix this, or tell me how to do settings that will fix it? As it is, I can’t use the iNat app to upload observations because it’s filling my gallery with undocumented, huge-memory images.

Screenshots are below. First screenshot is the “info” panel for an image in my gallery when I used the “classic” app’s camera mode. Second screenshot is an “info” panel for an image in my gallery when I used the new iNat CV-assisted camera mode. Third is an “info” panel for an image in my gallery when I used the new iNat regular camera mode.

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I’m fascinated to see that over 100 people have viewed this and no one has said “me too.” Wonder why?

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I don’t use the new app (or any of the apps hardly ever), so I’m probably not the best to comment, but two questions:

  1. All three photos look like they have locations associated with them in your screenshots.
  2. The two larger photos were also taken with a different camera in your phone (ultra wide) vs the first smaller one taken with main. Might this explain the size difference?
4

Huh @cthawley, you are right about the 3 photos having locations associate with them in my screenshots, which I didn’t notice when I made them. I made the screenshots on the iPhone, but the same images when transferred to my laptop don’t have geotags. So the problem there seems to be losing the geotag when they are uploaded to computer. Thanks for pointing this out! Something weird with Apple, not the app maybe. As to the ultra-wide camera, that seems to be something automatic, not a choice I made. I’ll have to investigate that further.
Unfortunately, these problems still make it impossible for me to use the app for submissions. But if I’m the only one experiencing them, I’m glad for everybody else. For the most part I find the new app pretty awesome.

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This may be totally irrelevant to the issue here, but I take photos directly with my iPhone 13 Pro, and then import them into iNat Next. The photos left on my phone say HEIF instead of JPEG.

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I just started using iNatNext (under its new name). When I have taken pictures a screen coming up offering to save iNat pictures to Photos. Can OP change something at that stage?
I actually don’t want to do that, but there is no option to decline. Where is the setting to have that feature off so that it doesn’t ask again every time I take a new photo?

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Thanks, @saturnring. That is what I have always done before, and will now continue to do (bypass the app, just take photos and submit later). I was just trying the direct submit route but am deciding it’s not for me. However I applaud all the new features for exploring data, and the “seek-like” offline ID help.

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I spent some time testing this yesterday. I’m pretty sure none of the photos you took are in RAW format. RAW is labeled as such and is really big. But, I do see that photos taken with the standard camera in the iNat app (not the AI camera) save much bigger jpegs than the AI camera does. Something we can look into.

All the photos below were taken with an iPhone 15 Pro.

iPhone Camera app, normal:

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iPhone Camera app, RAW mode, RAW Max selected

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iNaturalist AI Camera:

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iNaturalist Standard Camera:

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image1179Ă—2556 361 KB

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Thanks, @tiwane. I didn’t think they were the actual RAW because they had a .jpg extension, but they were some kinda weird format I couldn’t find described. I appreciate your checking into it.

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Some newer iPhones store a ton of metadata to support adjusting focus info and depth of field after the photo has been taken. This used to happen only when for photos taken in “Portrait” mode, but more recently happens even for photos taken in standard mode. This might be what you are seeing in your test (unclear whether this is the same issue the OP is having).

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