Prevent system from automatically adding generic ID as species name In Upload Observations page

General
1

I have been experiencing a slight issue in recent weeks, where when I am in the process of uploading new observations in the ‘Upload’ page, the system will automatically add extremely generic IDs in the Species field, such as ‘Plants’ or ‘Human’.

It will also add very generic and irrelevant tags to the observations as well, such as ‘Blur judgement:Appropriate’, ‘People’, ‘Mountains’, etc.

It’s not make or break for me, but it does mean I have to take extra time removing these automatic, often useless and sometimes inaccurate additions and putting in my own IDs and tags before I click ‘Submit [ x ] observations’.

Is there a way for me to turn off this automatic feature? I have looked in my account settings but cannot find it. Hoping to find an answer or solution for this!

2

what are your file names?

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3

I don’t name my files - these are automatically generated from the camera, so the format is IMG_XXXX

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4

This is a different bug - using the photo file names
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/everythings-coming-up-snowflakes/60935/17

But there is another bug - where a batch of obs from one observer all come thru as bats. Or fish. Clearly wrong and very odd.

5

I think you should log a bug report for this issue, ideally with a screenshot of the incorrect IDs and tags that were added.

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6

This sounds to me like there’s some sort of metadata being added to the photos before you upload them, which iNat then reads in and applies to the “tags” field + the IDs. My guess is that this is caused by some software you’re using to organize these photos.

If you look at the metadata of those photos, are there any tags or anything on them?

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7

I’ve just had a look at the photos in my folder now - it seems that Canon’s image wizard (image.canon) is indeed adding metadata tags to the photos, which is where those weird tags are coming from, it seems.

One aspect of the mystery solved! Thank you.

How annoying of Canon to do that.

It still kind of puzzles me why the Species field would choose overly generic IDs though (it appears that if it shows my hand in the image, such as when I put my hand behind a flower, it sets that obs as Human, which i must thereafter delete to put in the correct ID which would be for the flower).

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8

The species field is probably using the Canon tags to populate the field, similar to the Snowflake issue linked above. iNat’s web uploader automatically looks at photos’ metadata and will add IDs that match the tags. The “Human” species on iNat has “Person” and “People” as alternate names, so if the photo metadata has “Person” in it (like you said it does in the OP), it’ll get ID’d as “Human” – same with “Plants”, etc. If you’re able to prevent the Canon software from adding those tags, it should prevent the species ID issue too!

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