Safari on MacOS loses photos after initially seeing them in the Add Observations page

Platform MacOS Sierra 10.12.6, MacBook Pro

App version number N/A

Browser Safari 12.1.2

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem:

  1. Log in to iNaturalist website.
  2. Click the green + to add observations.
  3. Drag and drop photos from iPhotos to the observation creation page.
  4. Combine photos into observations with 1 to many photos.
  5. Add locations to new observations.
  6. Add notes and start identifying the organisms. This almost always involves opening other iNat windows and Googling. I have a suspicion that switching windows during “Loading metadata” is involved. I can try to recreate later.
  7. Notice that some but not all photos that were showing as thumbnails are missing and replaced with the file name from my computer. E.g., DSC09548. If I hover over the icon, it displays “Upload failed.” Occasionally all of the photos in an observation go missing but usually it’s just some of them. I know it happens when the first photo is gone but I think it has happened other times that I didn’t notice because sometimes I don’t have all the photos that I remember I dragging and dropping.
  8. If I upload the observations, the files with file names do not appear. I can drag and drop them again into the waiting observation to workaround the problem but it’s a pain because it happens most of the time with varying numbers of photos.

Update: When adding back the missing photos that prompted me to open this report, photos in previously affected observations disappeared. These photos were not “Loading Metadata” at the time.

Update 2: I ought to mention that I load many observations at a time. My camera doesn’t have GPS, and loading a bunch makes it easier to set the locations.

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It happens with me when I accidentally move photos from the folder I upload from, probably it’s something about Internet connection with your case. Have you tried uploading the newest version of the browser, could this influence somehow?

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Just to check - what are the file sizes of some of these photos?

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As far as I an tell, I have the most recent version of Safari for my OS. The laptop is a few years old. I’ll try using Chrome.

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I didn’t check. Here are some representative photos from that session:

On my computer, 5.4MB: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/82629973
Mine, 5.5MM: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/82633182
Mine, 8MB:https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/82827771

They are pretty large. I upload at the default size.

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Are you using iPhoto, or Photos (which is what iPhotos turned into)? I would pretty much always recommend exporting photos from Photos to your computer (I usually export photos to my desktop), then uploading them. Dragging and dropping from directly from iPhotos/Photos is something that I’ve seen cause issues for other users.

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Yep, using iPhoto. Sigh…

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