Platform: Website
Browser: Any (tested on Windows 11 Chrome)
URL: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload
Description of problem
When uploading an image to the iNaturalist website that contains a non-English description metadata, the text imported into the “Note” field appears misencoded.
Steps to Reproduce
- Take a photo and set the EXIF “rdf:Description” metadata (named Title in Windows) to a non-English string (e.g., in Cyrillic, Chinese, or other non-Latin charset).
- Upload the photo to the iNaturalist website via the standard upload interface.
- Check the “Note” field associated with the uploaded image.
Expected Behavior
The non-English “rdf:Description” should be imported into the “Note” field correctly, preserving the original characters.
Observed Behavior
The text in the “Note” field is garbled, misencoded, or replaced with unrelated characters.
Additional Notes
The “rdf:Description” is UTF-8 by default, but it appears to be handled as if it were ANSI.