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): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome
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/):
While that works, you used to just be able to search the coordinates in the Location box, and the “appropriate” input boxes would autofill, which was a lot more efficient.
not sure what to tell you. it looks like the iNat developers switched out the interface that they use for finding Google Places. so that’s just the way this new interface behaves.
i doubt this new behavior would be considered a bug, but maybe the iNat developers might consider adding some logic to parse coordinates in the input box?
This was bugging me too. I updated my Chrome extension to hack it back in; I’ll reply again once the update is reviewed and published (probably a couple days).
We’ll see if we can add it back, but it might take some doing.
I’m interested in why you’re manually entering coordinates - are you recording coordinates in the field? It’s not a workflow I’m familiar with.
Speaking for myself, when identifying I sometimes crop previously uploaded images and reupload them to see what CV has to say about the cropped version vs. the original. I was using the copy button added by the extension to easily replicate the location of the original observation.
I don’t have GPS but hike in a group. If a companion has uploaded pictures of that I copy their GPS for my obs. (But I have always gone via the latitude and longitude boxes)
My camera doesn’t collect coordinates, so if I’m posting a photo from it, I need to manually enter them. I usually collect them in Gaia, or take a photo in the same place and use the Google Photos location tagging (I have a Pixel).
If I’m uploading a photo form my phone, I don’t need to do that, but I think we’re all happier with me not getting up close and personal to get a nice cellphone photo with a grey wolf.
I’ve only ever recorded and entered coordinates this way, so am hoping the ability gets restored. I used to geotag my photos from the recorded coordinates first, but found that was just an extra step that was slowing me down, when I could paste in the coordinates directly instead.
This is my first time posting in the forum, so my apologies if this has come up already.
I upload a large number of observations and often use my Garmin GPS tracks to enter and/or verify the location.
Up until about a month ago, I could enter the GPS coordinates in the “Search for Location” field at the top of the location dialog box when uploading new observations. This no longer seems to work - has anyone else noticed this?
To enter the coordinates into the Lat/Long fields at the bottom is a rather slow process in comparison to the single cut & paste, and it also does not appear to accept the format that I get from Garmin of “N49 14.163 W124 49.083”. My workaround for now as been to enter this format into Google Maps, get back the decimal string “49.236050, -124.818050”, and then split this into the two halves of the lat/long fields.
This is workable for now, but I was hoping to upload a bunch of my old observations over the winter, and this will easily double the time required.
Was this feature intentionally removed? Is there a better alternative that I’m overlooking?
Thanks @tiwane - I hadn’t seen this earlier thread. I’ll take a look at the options for an app to sync the photos with the GPS track!
I’ll also put in a vote that this original feature would still be great if we could get it back. I’d be cautious of using an app to replace the coordinates in cases where my phone photos are already tagged, as there are cases where I like to compare both manually. The phone often has much larger errors than the handheld GPS (so I’ll use the GPS data as “better”), but there are also cases where I hop out of the car for a few minutes during the course of a longer trip and forget to bring the GPS, so this phone data would be lost (presumably?) if I were to overwrite the metadata in bulk by syncing to the GPS track.
One of the issues I’m having is that I use Google Photos, which is geotagged, but I can’t upload directly from Google Photos to iNat on web browser. I have to download the photo, upload it, and add the coordinates.
To be honest, my camera system is outdated and I do not have a geo-tagging function/setup. But also, GPS can be imprecise, for example in the mountains, so memory often serves me better in my experience. But then I prefer to use the more detailed local maps (of Switzerland), and copy/paste the coordinates.
Some countries also use a different coordinate system - sometimes I need to convert when I receive the coordinates in the “wrong” format
Thanks though for the tutorial, I will probably try to set that up this summer!
I also used this feature heavily when using the desktop web uploader and it’s really annoying that it no longer works. I don’t have any GPS logging in my cameras. All of my bird observations are GPS tracked in eBird, and when I go to upload photos to iNat, I used to simply grab the GPS coordinates of the eBird hotspot and use that to update the location in the iNat upload process. A lot of my observations don’t align to a named place that can be searched (ex: a random roadside in rural Mexico, or a dive site miles offshore in Papua New Guinea), so I now have to waste time scrolling around on the map in iNat to find the correct location, even though I already have the GPS coordinates from eBird (I also grab GPS coordinates for unfamiliar dive sites via a dummy checklist in eBird). Please bring this back!!!
I also would like this functionality. I often geolocate in separate software (maybe to access different map layers, like using OSM or Acme Mapper) and then copy over. It’s still possible to do this, just slower.
I would be so glad if this returns. I use it so much more than I thought. Here are some situations:
take pictures of bird with my zoom lense in a location where I did everything else with my phone. At home I could copy paste location data from the other observation data, but currently have to work out with satellite imagery where exactly.
do a (long) boat tour, pelagic. Maybe I take a picture every few hours. I take a picture of the GPS coordinates directly after an observation so I have precise data. Very annoying currently. I have precise data, but no way to enter the data precisely.
receive coordinates from a cave I visited with friends. The coordinates are mostly even in another coordinate system, but that’s another problem. I then again have to “translate” using the satellite images
unexpected roadside bird observation - take pictures from the car, but need to be quick - time to set a pin in google maps, but not to stay around. Used to be enough, now again annoying “translation”
I have tried the suggested solution by @tiwane but find that unpractical in many of the situations mentioned earlier: Single images per day or every few hours with my “zoom camera” does not justify letting the GPS app run all the time nor the added work later to add the coordinates in the metadata if I could just copy paste them. Also, although specialized, in caves GPS does not run. Despite that the GPS app process is prone to errors: Wrong time zone on camera, forgot to switch on etc
