Photo order in mobile version overwriting photo order set on desktop site

I often use a good camera without GPS, so what I often do is take an initial field observation using my phone camera and then document the specimen more fully with my larger camera. However, because of this, I have noticed a strange glitch in the iNat system.

When I upload the higher-quality photos in the desktop version, I usually set the high-quality observation to be first using the “re-order photos” function. However, what ends up happening is when I refresh the iNat app (either by adding more observations or checking to see if the photos uploaded properly) I find that invariably what happens is the order of the photos will be re-set to the order they were on the mobile app. Any new photos will invariably be moved to the end of the list, which can be a problem because the photos taken on mobile are often not identifiable to species and can get overlooked when scrolling on mobile view (i.e., one obviously wants the most diagnostic photo first). If I try to reset the order again using the desktop site, the iNat app will overwrite the photo order again if I refresh the app.

The only way I can change the order of the photos if they have both mobile phone pictures and camera pictures on the same observation is to manually change each observation using the “set observation to first” function on the mobile app. This ends up taking a lot of time because I have to go back and forth between iNat mobile and the desktop site.

For additional clarification, I am using iNat for Android.

1 Like

Could you show which numbers do you use when you reorder photos on the computer?

@fffffffff Can you clarify what you mean? I am not entirely sure what you are asking about.

If you mean what numbers do I number the photos in the reorder function, I go 0>1>2>3, similar to what I have noticed the program use if I have uploaded multiple photos using the mobile app and I check how it defined the order if I try to manually re-order them. I make sure to give every photo a number so it doesn’t get confused.

I believe there’s an existing bug report for this: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/issues/1044

I just had this issue happen to me (but on iOS). The exact thing happened as per megaraptor1’s comment on the github issue, i.e. that:

Additionally, noticed that this issue does not just occur when the observation is created via app, but occurs whenever photos are uploaded via app and website. I had an observation which I uploaded via the website, then added an additional photo taken via phone. The phone photo was automatically made the first observation, even though it was the last picture added. So it is not just the app preserves the order and this is not updated by the website, the app appears to overwrite the previous order such that app photos are always first.

I uploaded 5 pics via desktop, then went to the app and added 4 more pics from my phone camera, and they became the first 4 pics on the observation when I checked back on the desktop.

1 Like