I’m not actually sure if this is a bug or me doing something weird, but I’ve been using iNat heavily for the past 2ish years and it only just started happening this morning. When I upload pictures some of them automatically fill in species IDs; for a while they were all salamander chytrids and for …

Yeah, the file name included an “ADA” in it, and I could replicate the issue. Two proposals to prevent this particular issue from happening the future: only use currently accepted scientific names for file name matching, and don’t try to match file names when duplicating an obs. Resonable?

I just realized this might have been ambiguous – this is happening at the edit stage in “add observations”; everything stays correct once they’re fully submitted.

[00 AM] And now it’s back to chytrids.

Can you please send a few of these photos to help@inaturalist.org so we can take a look at them?

by chance did the file name have either bd or bsal in the name ?

@tiwane - those are both entered for some bizarre reason as english names for that species, so likely the same bug. Added by the same user who was at the root of the bird subspecies names issue. Not sure what they are doing or how many other totally random things they have added.

FYI bd IS a shorthand for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis,and presumably Bsal is the proper shortening for the salamander disease (so BD should probably be removed, but at least it is close). See: https://amphibiaweb.org/chytrid/Bsal.html I presume the file names had bd or Bsal if those in it, along…

But it is not an English name, if these are going to be entered, then should not a lexicon equivalent to the bird banding codes ones (Aou 4 Letter Codes) etc be created and used ?

Hmm, yea I don’t know what the proper lexicon would be. In my limited experience with herp people, I recall them just calling the disease Bd, but that still might just count as technical jargon not quite moving over to true “english”. I guess like the equivalent would be me calling something a derme…

bsal is popular in Holland https://www.ravon.nl/bsal , and not Herp people i heard it many times

That was happening to me also. It seemed to be picking up the filename, but not always getting it right. For instance, I had a filename “black-tailed_jackrabbit…” - when it loaded it was labelled “black jackrabbit.” I thought it was a new iNat algorithm that still had kinks in it. Then, as of mid-da…

Observations uploading with random species

Bug Reports

Topic		Replies	Views
Add observation - Automatically tagged my observations with incorrect names based on photo filenames Bug Reports	76	5647	May 29, 2020
When doing a batch upload it starts automatically ID'ing all observations to a random species Bug Reports	8	231	December 3, 2025
Parsing identifications from file name General	6	996	November 25, 2019
Photos with names beginning with "Orange..." General	15	794	October 13, 2022
iNat suggested identifications match ID name in filename Bug Reports	2	244	November 30, 2022

Observations uploading with random species

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