did something change in the system that might have caused this?
i don’t think it’s related to the daylight savings shift, since my set of observations from Mar 11 have timestamp.
i’m looking at the photo metadata in one of the observations missing time, and it has the time captured: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/33036820. so i don’t think the problem is in the photo metadata.
i thought maybe it was specific to computer uploads (since i upload via computer), but here are two observations uploaded by another guy at the same time, which i assume he uploaded using the same uploader:
if you need to know my process, let me know, and i can provide more info.
EDIT: i opened one of the missing-time observations in edit mode, and i can see the time is there in the “When did you see it?” box. so it’s something about the way the system chooses to display (or not) the time.
This is happening to me as well. I am sitting on 50 plus new observations, and am having difficulty adding them since I do it chronologically. I noticed the individual observations have a time, it just doesn’t show up in the list of observations or on the individual observation page. It shows if you click “edit observation”.
2 observations actually displayed the time, none of the others are yet. Sorry to ask again, but any closer to a fix? My entire research project has ground to a halt. I upload every insect I trap into inat, and organize by date and time. I have a shipment of bees waiting to be catalogued. I see now I have created a bottleneck with no way to work around easily if inat doesn’t work.
i loaded some new observations from yesterday Mar 25, and what i noticed was that all the observations made between 12PM and 1PM CDT show timestamp. the observations in you screenshot that have times also occur between 12PM and 1PM.
It would be good to know your exact workflow for adding observations, step-by step, with screenshots if possible. Do you edit the date(s) for these observations in the uploader?
yeah. i’m pretty sure it has something to do with dates that fall outside of 12PM to 1PM and 12AM to 1AM. i noticed the problem first on this the observations from this person in my area, who i thought was maybe just inputting dates without time, but if you go back and look through that person’s observations (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?page=2&place_id=any&subview=table&user_id=das43), it looks like anything within those time ranges is showing up with time. note that his problem didn’t just start in March.
maybe there’s some sort of weird logic that is trying to do special parsing of 12AM and 12PM (because they technically come before 1AM and 1PM, respectively), and maybe that logic is broken. why it only happens for some users and only for some date ranges, i have no idea.
From memory, it validates the date/time as you enter it, and it appears as a different colour if it is invalid. Before submitting any new uploads, check the colour to see if it is a valid parse, and then if it fails to show, it is more likely to be a system problem.
I was experiencing the same problem last week and, while annoying, I found a workaround: make sure the hour is displayed in 2-digit 24 hour style without “AM/PM”. So that means 08:00 instead of 8:00, 13:00 instead of 1:00, and delete the “AM”/“PM” designations. Unfortunately this only works on the web for now, app doesn’t let you edit time that way.
Bit of a pain to do manually but it’s a fix for now until this issue gets resolved.
Edit: for reference, nearly all my photos are taken with a Samsung Galaxy S6 and uploaded either via the app on my phone or Firefox web browser on my laptop.
actually, i’m noticing that if I go back to those observations missing times to edit them today, the times will show up. I know that this wasn’t the behavior before, because i’ll often go in after upload and change descriptions to add links to reference other observations, etc.
even just clicking the edit button and then saving without actually changing anything seems to do the trick.
Yes, we released a fix a few hours ago. However, this will only affect newly-made observations, or newly updated ones. One more efficient way to do the latter is to go to the Observations Edit page (eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/pisum). Click on Batch Edit, then select the observations that don’t show a time stamp but should. Click on “Edit Selected”.
Then, on the next page, scroll all the way to the bottom and click “Save All” - you don’t need to actually make any edits. The time stamp should now appear. This was working on our test server so it should work on the live site. Might be worth trying it for only a few observations at first.
i haven’t seen the problem in my own observations since the fix was implemented, but interestingly, it looks like the problem might still exist for that user i mentioned before: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=das43.
