Platform: Website Browser: Any (tested on Windows 11 Chrome) URL: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload [screen1] 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 appear…

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

I just sent two examples to help@inaturalist.org

Tony, are there any updates on the issue? Last we discussed, you were able to reproduce it, but the developers were on Christmas holidays.

Have any steps been taken to address this bug? It’s quite surprising that in 2025, the site still does not handle UTF-8 correctly - something that has been standard for over two decades. Would you recommend that I open an issue on GitHub regarding this?

[image] dmka: the site still does not handle UTF-8 correctly I just tested this, and it works fine for me. Are you sure the tool you’re using to edit the image metadata isn’t the problem? I used exiftool to add the relevant tags. To be clear, these are the XMP dc:description and dc:title tags…

PS: one thing I forgot to ask is what your system locale settings are. I don’t use Windows myself, but my understanding is that its default encoding isn’t UTF-8. Have you explicitly changed the settings yourself? The garbled text shown in your image looks very similar to what would be produced by de…

I attempted to set the description metadata using both Adobe Photoshop’s File Info tool and the standard Windows file property editor, both of which, to my understanding, generate de-facto standard XMP metadata. Locale is en-US. However, neither method was successful. In production, I use Adobe Lig…

I opened the jpegs in a binary editor and the embedded text appears to be encoded in UTF-16, but definitely not Windows-1252.

[image] dmka: the embedded text appears to be encoded in UTF-16, but definitely not Windows-1252 The relevant tags are all encoded as UTF-8, but having now looked at the iNaturalist source code, it seems the raw bytes of some tags are just treated as ASCII text - regardless of the encoding - …

Thank you bazwal I tried several methods and was only able to achieve the desired result by adding a command to the workflow that removes the EXIF ImageDescription tag exiftool -overwrite_original -EXIF:ImageDescription= {FILE} or, for directories: exiftool -overwrite_original -EXIF:ImageDescrip…

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

Bug Reports

pisum November 30, 2025, 3:45pm 17

i think this has been resolved (maybe https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/pull/4703/commits). i tested a photo with Russian and Chinese characters, and they imported fine into the description / notes.

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

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