Signing Out Doesn't Clear Storage on Phone: Uninstalling + Reinstalling App Required

Bug Reports
1

iNaturalist was taking up obscene amounts of data (30GB) on my phone and I needed to clear the cache, so, following the instructions here:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-using-lots-of-storage-on-iphone/3316

I logged out and logged back in. This did not clear the cache, the data usage was still high. I also tried resetting my phone, which did nothing.

I was forced to uninstall the app, after logging out, and then reinstall it. This fixed the problem. Then I was able to log back in. I would consider this a workaround, not a solution, because I had to spend quite a lot of time troubleshooting today, searching for the forum posts, following instructions, then trying multiple things.

I also would strongly prefer not to have to log out, as it’s tedious to log back in because my password is long, and I often have to repeat it because I frequently make an error, and I especially don’t want to have to do it twice because it didn’t clear the cache!

Wouldn’t it be simple to make a menu option available that just forces clearing of the cache? This seems particularly valuable because the amount of storage usage by iNaturalist is so high, it is by far the most space usage of any app and the second highest usage after the main camera storage. It would also save a lot of time, like a lot of people seem to have complained about the high usage on the forums over the past few years.

Also, it might be worth enabling some setting that would allow a rolling clearing of the cache, or perhaps an option (set by default?) to delete image files after they are successfully uploaded? Or perhaps mark them for deletion after some time date like 3 months? I can think of a long list of ways that would address the storage issue proactively, without having to require any input from the user.

Running out of storage on your phone can be very problematic. It’s happened to my partner, who has had some critical use of her phone that she needs in the moment, and then her phone runs out of storage and she has to like, rush to clear it, and if you need to do complex troubleshooting, it creates a stressful situation where you’re having to do it under pressure. Since iNaturalist has a way of accumulating such large amounts of storage usage because of taking all the photos, it seems critically important to have the app, by default, proactively manage this stuff, or it will be inconveniencing the user. I am very glad I caught this usage before the storage filled up completely, but I would strongly prefer that I don’t have to think about this stuff, that it’s handled automatically because it’s just one more thing to be worrying about in our overly-complex world.

I am on Android and am using the most recent version of the app although before I uninstalled it it might have been a few days since I updated it.

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2

Are you referring to cache, storage, or both? Did tapping “clear cache” in your phone settings work?

There’s an existing feature request for adding a “clear cache” option within the app itself, though you should be able to go to settings>Apps>iNaturalist>Storage and cache to clear the cache, storage, or both.

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Looking through past posts, there are already measures in place to limit and clear the amount of data being stored on the device, including removing full-size photos.

(As far as your long password, password manager apps/software like KeePass definitely come in handy!)

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If you continue to have this issue, you can try sending log files (instructions here).

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4

You should restart the app, egg. rebooting your phone should clean your Android with a rather recent version of the app.

5

It did not. I both closed the app, and restarted my phone, while logged out, but it did not clear the cache. I had updated my app just about a week ago so it was a fairly recent version of the app.

6

Is this a very recent version upgrade that only came out in the past few days? I had updated my app very recently, then updated it again today, so unless this was a super recent addition, this seems odd. Like it was still using 30GB of data this morning.

As a side note, I just searched online for an iNaturalist app version history with dates, and I was unable to find one, which is really frustrating. Wouldn’t it be really easy to make that information easily available through a simple web search? Also why doesn’t the play store show that type of information and make it easy to access? You all probably have more influence over the app store than I do, I’m just a little peon and you all are not only developers, but of a prominent and well-respected app.

But it might be nice for there to be an easy-to-access list of the version history, to help troubleshoot stuff like this.

7

According to this list, 1.24.0 was released Jan 28th, 2022, so like, really long ago. Yet my app was still using 30GB of storage space.

I don’t think I can send log files because I uninstalled the app today, so presumably it purged everything.

8

Next time you should send the logs with information if the occupied space is userdata or cache. The improvements were released in october 2021, a year a go, not recently.

1 Like
9

I just had this problem again, and it is more severe than my original post let on.

I not only signed out of the app and restarted my phone, but I DELETED the app and it has not deleted the images.

My phone is almost completely out of storage space and I can find no quick and easy way to delete all these 70+GB of images that this app has taken.

I want a fix IMMEDIATELY. I am going to have to go through manually and delete these photos otherwise and it is going to be incredibly time-consuming to do so.

My phone ran out of storage unexpectedly yesterday when I was 2 hours away from home and needed to use the phone for essential things like checking weather and getting directions.

This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed ASAP.

10

Deleting the app freed up about an additional 3GB of space but there are still over 72GB of images on my phone, nearly all of which are plant photos that I took specifically in the iNaturalist app. They show up in my “Gallery” app under the DCIM folder.

I don’t know how to delete these any other way than going through manually and deleting them and that would be an incredible waste of my time.

I want this stuff handled automatically by the app.

Why is this evening happening?

I’m so angry. I donate monthly to support iNaturalist, I’m super active on it and trying to contribute.

This hit me at a really stressful time. I’m so frustrated I want to cry. I’ve already been having a rough week and I’m just at my wits end. I don’t want to debug it. I don’t want to send any logs. I can’t send any logs because I already deleted the app.

I just want you all to fix it without me having to do any work.

11

I don’t care that I’m not mentally stable $#!$#!^!(*&@^#^@!37^#@#@~

12

the app saves photos to the phone as well as within the app itself. i too wish this could be disabled as i dont really want all of those on my phone and photo gallery when they are already on inat. what i do is plug the phone into the computer and download then delete all of them. but its not idea especially when ive got kid pictures sprinkled in that i want to save because they dont go to a different folder

13

What? This is by design? And you are telling me there is no way to delete them?

I want this fixed yesterday.

Ugh. Like I had no idea and if I had known I would have deleted this stuff regularly.

This is just such inexcusably bad design.

I want people to know how and why this happened to me and why I feel so aggressively upset about this.

I have been under a great deal of stress this week and there have been many different things going wrong in my life, completely unrelated to iNaturalist.

I was out and about when my phone ran out of space and I was fiddling around in the app, but I also wanted to keep taking more photos because I was in a really interesting habitat with a ton of fascinating plants and it was a place 1.5-2 hours from where I live so it is not exactly easy or nontrivial to go back there another day.

And I hate like…when I’m under stress and I’m out and about trying to do something and then I have to spend time doing a difficult troubleshooting while under time pressure. I can’t deal with it well and I become likely to snap mentally or have a mental breakdown.

And then today I am back home and again I still have a lot of stressful stuff I am dealing with, but I want to go in and definitively solve this and it’s so frustrating I go through the stuff I did before and it doesn’t seem to fix it.

And like nowhere have I seen this explained until your note? Like your reply makes sense.

But now I’m just frustrated. Why wasn’t this made clear to me that the app is duplicating the photos and why is the user not warned that the photos need to be deleted manually? I don’t know.

I just am frustrated.

And this stuff is so annoying because we are so dependent on smartphones. I am pressured to use smartphones in every aspect of my life. My last apartment I lived in I couldn’t do laundry without an app. I go to the grocery store and I need to use an app to get discounts and of course I need the discounts because the prices of everything has gone up.

I am continually pressured by corporations and other organizations to use apps I don’t want to, just in order to live my life.

And it’s really debilitating when anything on my phone doesn’t work. Storage, battery. And of course all these apps are placing demands on all of these resources.

It feels like a form of violence against me.

This is why I react with such anger about this stuff. I am much less angry at iNaturalist than I am at the rest of the world and the corporations that are even more aggressive. No one is forcing me to use iNaturalist.

But it is still being designed in a way that is not mindful of the limitations users face.

I also feel like this stuff discriminates against me because of my lifestyle. I am using a phone that is nearly 4 years old. I am doing this because I believe in a low-consumption lifestyle. And I think that lifestyle is superior and is something that I want all of us in society to incentivize.

When apps are designed in a way that does not take resources utilization seriously and does not make it super easy or even automatic to minimize that resource utilization, it creates an incentive for planned obsolesence and early disposal of things.

I want to keep using my phone longer, ideally a year or longer if I could. iNaturalist’s use of space due to images is a limiting factor in the functioning of my phone. I suspect I’m probably not the only one who has experienced this? I don’t know.

I’m just very salty about this. I want people to know how serious this issue is. It relates to issues of sustainability and resource waste in society as a whole. It relates to issues of stress and intrusion of corporations in our daily lives.

I’m going to go fix this now by manually deleting the photos, now that I know I need to do this.

But I’m really irked about this. It is just a really crappy thing, really intrusive and annoying. At a bare minimum iNaturalist needs to make clearer to users that they will need to manually delete photos on their phone, but I would strongly prefer them to have an option to not save them or delete them after upload, or a button to auto-delete all of them.

15

I think he means that taking pictures in-app also saves them to your phone’s photo gallery. Yes, I have seen this. But I can delete them off the photo gallery without affecting them on iNaturalist.

16

yeah i delete them the same way i delete other photos i take. i think it would be good to be able to choose not to save them to the phone but i haven’t seen that option. it also saves them in the app but for my (iphone) app if i log out then in again it does clear it. I do consider that a flaw and wish it wouldn’t keep them or would let you choose cache size or press a change cache button.

iNat used to update things often but it’s grinded to a halt the past few years. They say because they are trying to keep up with scaling which may very well be true. But the app’s been on schedule for a big update for many years. Maybe that’s coming out soon and will be better.

Also always remember to turn off auto sync