Stuck on 'creating observation

Bug Reports
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1

IOS 16.6
Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): IOS 16.6

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 16.6

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: none

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

unnamed
unnamed295×640 90.3 KB

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: OPENING APP AND TRYING TO CREATE AN OBSERVATION

Step 2: CHOOSE A PHOTO FROM THE PHOTO LIBRARY-APPLE PHOTOS APP WITH BLUE CHECK MARK

Step 3: HIT ‘ADD’, BLACK BOX APPEARS WITH ‘Creating Observation’ and spinning white circle and stays there permanently unless I restart the phone

2

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): IOS 17.0.1

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 17.0.1

Step 1: OPENING APP AND TRYING TO CREATE AN OBSERVATION

Step 2: CHOOSE A PHOTO FROM THE PHOTO LIBRARY-APPLE PHOTOS APP WITH BLUE CHECK MARK

Step 3: HIT ‘ADD’, BLACK BOX APPEARS WITH ‘Creating Observation’ and spinning white circle and stays there permanently unless I restart the app - recent pictures seem okay, but any older pictures (perhaps before I upgraded to 17.0.1?) cause the app to hang. I have a lot of older observations I am trying to upload and I am stuck.

3

Do you use iCloud Photos?

4

Hi folks,

What version of the app are you on? You can find that in iNaturalist by going to the Me tab, tapping the settings icon in the top right, and then scrolling to the bottom of the App settings screen.

Thanks,
alex

5

Same thing is happening to me, using iNaturalist 3.2.15, iOS 17.0.1, iPhone 13 Pro. It just hangs when I try to upload anything (and I haven’t had this happen until a week or two ago).

6

Same thing happening to me recently

IOS version: 16.6.1
IPhone 11
App version: 3.2.15. build 708

7

@nepokroeff @ThosMoore - are you saying you can’t upload older photos (eg photos taken before updated to iOS 17), or can’t upload any photos at all, including ones taken today?

8

Once in a while, the app will successfully create an observation (maybe once out of ten tries), but this problem affects not only older photos but also photos taken today with iOS 17. This problem started around two weeks ago, and I think started happening before upgrading to iOS 17.

9

Thanks. A few more questions, if you have a moment.

  • how much storage space is left on your device?

  • are you using iCloud Photos?

  • some users who’ve encountered this problem said that deleting and reinstalling the app fixes it. Have you tried that?

10

Sure — lots of device storage available (102 GB out of 256 GB used). I am using iCloud Photos. Haven’t tried deleting and reinstalling the app — I’ll give that a try in the morning.

2 Likes
11

Hi everyone - passing along a tip on this. I had the problem as well when I went to 17.x. The problem appears to be if the picture on my phone is the “lite” version of the image, with the high resolution version only on iCloud. If I go into the picture and the high res version gets downloaded the phone, then I am able to create observations with the older pictures. I was able to reproduce the issue and it appears to be a reliable workaround in my case at least. Hope this helps some of you out there too. Please update the post with your experiences with this.

1 Like
12

Apologies - just saw that you’d replied. I usually only use the app, not the website. Yes, I do use iCloud and I believe I’ve identified the issue and have developed a reliable workaround. Details in my post below, hoping it will help others too.

13

I’m having the same problem with the app. I reinstalled it, but that didn’t solve the problem. I logged into the website and selected “Add Observations” and then selected the photos from Photo Library. Got an error message “There were some problems with these files IMG_0178.heic. File type not supported.” (That’s just an example, one or more images were listed every time I tried this). I forgot to take a screen shot the first time, so went through the same steps on the website. This time when I selected the same photos, the observations were loaded with no errors. Then I went back to the app and didn’t have any issues with creating an observation using those same photos. Later I discovered that the intermediate step of adding observations a second time to the website was unnecessary. After getting the error of ‘File type not supported’, I could go back to the app and it would accept the photos and create an observation.

14

Can you please share a screenshot of what you’re seeing? Here are instructions for how to take a screenshot on several types of devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org

15

Same here! It just started yesterday. using iNaturalist 3.2.15, iOS 17.0.3, iPhone 14 Pro. Hangs up on a random photo with ‘creating observation’ and have to close the app. What’s weird is some photos I have just taken are fine, some get stuck. I have deleted app and re-installed with no change. Odd thing after the latest IOS upgrade is when I start the upload there is a new banner that appears on the top of my photo gallery regarding Private Access to Photos ‘Your photo library is shown here, but ‘iNaturalist’ can only access the items you select.’ Also there is an Option feature at the bottom of the gallery now pointing to Format choices: Automatic (currently checked), Current and Most Compatible.

16

OK, I was able to replicate this in one situation. We were thinking this might have to do with photos taken on different devices than the one being used to make the observation, so I used my Pad. I have iCloud Photos turned on for my devices.

  1. I took a photo on my iPad Mini 4. Not sure if it matters, but my iPad’s using HEIC for photos.
  2. The photo synced to iCloud.
  3. I opened my iPhone 13 Pro, then opened up iNat and made a new observation, choosing the “Photo Library” option.
  4. I tapped on the photo taken with my iPad.
  5. Got the “Creating Observation” endless spinner.

For those of you experiencing this issue: were the photos you tried to import taken on another device and synced via iCloud?

17

Hi, I’ve experienced this ‘creating observation’ issue too - no matter how long you leave it, it never resolves to create the new observation.

I’m using iPhone 15 Pro Max with iOS 17.0.3 and I have iCloud Photo Library enabled.

Any recent photos on my device are imported no problem. Non-recent photos tend to generate this issue.

I have experimented with trying to import historic iPhone photos vs historic DSLR photos (both in iCloud): the DSLR photos do not generate the error, only photos taken on different iOS devices.

When I visit the troublesome photos in the Photo App on the device I’m uploading from, they appear to be full res and local.

I have some other apps which call on my Photo album and occasionally I see a ‘downloading’ function while it pulls from iCloud. I don’t see the same on iNaturalist (although that could be an under-the-hood function with no UI clues).

I think the issue is iNat App isn’t able to call/download from iCloud for certain photo types (rather than any device specific quirks).

1 Like
18

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): IOS

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 3.2.15, build 708

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) :

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/):

IMG_0114.PNG
IMG_0114.PNG1179×2556 152 KB

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Upgrade to new iPhone 15 Pro

Step 2: Sync to iCloud

Step 3: Open iNaturalist application

Step 4: Press Observe to create a new observation

Step 5: Select ‘Photo Library’ as the source of observation

Step 6: Select photos and press Add

Result: If photos were created on old iPhone, app hangs as shown in screenshot. If photos were taken on new iPhone, app loads observation normally. Note that the camera can also be used to create new observations in realtime.

19

I don’t know if someone will have an explanation or a fix for this, but just wanted to point out that you could still add the observations from a computer at iNaturalist.org (if you have one) in the meantime. It is usually more efficient than adding them through the mobile app anyway.

1 Like
20

I’ve moved your report to this existing bug report since it seems to be the same issue. If not, please let us know how it appears to be different, and we can return to a different report. Thanks!