I’m noticing a metadata quirk that borders on a “bug”, but I’m not sure if this behavior is intended or not:
When there are multiple images in a single observation, the originals may have been taken over a span of more than one minute and thus the metadata time stamp on the photos will differ. However, when all the images are collected into one observation on iNat and uploaded, apparently all the photos of such a set are assigned the time stamp of the first (primary) image, as viewed via the Info button for each photo. I view this is as undesirable since the photos may have been taken from one to several to many minutes apart. Here’s an example from my trail camera at home: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/249558981
The first and third original images of the armadillo were actually captured about 9 minutes apart, but I am confident that these are the same animal and worthy of being uploaded as a single observation.
Is this an intended behavior or is it a bug that needs to be addressed?
This is tangentially related to the “multiple dates” topic, but that is a quantitatively different situation.
This doesn’t seem like a bug to me. The overall/master time stamp on the observation represents the time that the observer first encountered the organism; using the first time stamp seems like the correct decision to me. Eg say I find a bird and spend 20 minutes taking photos of it; the time of the first photo is the only one that is relevant imo to the overall timestamp of the whole observation, as it represents the moment I first encountered the bird
Perhaps you’re correct about the first time stamp being a “master time stamp” and the most important for the observation as a whole. I think this just bothers me because of the inexact or erroneous data (time stamps) for the subsequent photos. Why is it necessary to substitute that master time stamp for the actual time stamps in the individual photo metadata as displayed on iNat??
right, I missed this part of your post (I think I replied before you added it). I agree with you Chuck that this seems like odd/undesirable behaviour to me, and individual photos should retain their original timestamp
(although I can understand a decision to force their timestamps to match the observation to avoid potential confusion?)
That is true for long distance changes but for shorter distances, some people will take pictures to upload later and clump those pictures into one observation. I did the same thing when I was a new member and would recommend uploading observations in the field, unless you took the observation pictures with a camera.
Sometimes location metadata can vary even if the observer is standing still, for technological reasons. It’s usually not a great deal of variance, but I’ve sometimes knelt down to take a few photos of a plant or arthropod and when uploading the photos, found them to be a couple of meters apart. I could imagine it maybe being interesting to someone to see what the variation is across photos (maybe it could be a proxy for location accuracy?).
Other times, the location may change because you’re taking a very far-away photo of something (perhaps to avoid spooking it), then stepping closer and taking another photo, etc. Or taking multiple photos of an organism that is moving around.
If the location coordinates are in the photo’s metadata and the observation has a geoprivacy of “open”, it’s displayed on the photo’s page. For example, this photo of mine. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see GPS coordinates.
A lot of times (eg in most iPhone use cases, Apple doesn’t really include it), the data are not there and there’s nothing for iNat to show.
