The way that I normally post an observation is to go into my google photos, find the photo I want, crop if needed, and then share into iNat. This has worked well for me for about the last 1000 observations of mine, and generally is good about feeding the metadata including time and location automatically.
Today this stopped working. I share the photo like normal, but about the half the time it isnt uploading the metadata. More challenging, the photo will load, then I click suggest ID, I select the correct ID, then it returns to the observation page and the thumbnail for the photo is gone, replaced by a thumbnail of an envelope. Then if I try to save it I get the dreaded error that “it appears the cache deleted the photo blah blah.”
I cannot figure out what chaged or what to do about it. A restart did not solve the issue, but made the failure to upload metadata 100%.
I am using a Pixel 2 with the most up to date chrome and iNat. This problem persists even if I try to upload from inside the iNat app.
The error does not exist using the desktop site on my laptoip using chrome, but I dislike this method because it does not automatically upload the meta data so I have to select time and location manually.