Non-English EXIF image description is not imported correctly into the Note field

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Website

Browser: Any (tested on Windows 11 Chrome)

URL: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload

screen1
screen11156×1060 185 KB

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

  1. 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).
  2. Upload the photo to the iNaturalist website via the standard upload interface.
  3. 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.

2

Can you please send some of these photos to help@inaturalist.org?