I have been using iNaturalist regularly for the past couple of weeks and have uploaded several hundred photos without a problem. The past couple of days when I have attempted to upload some photos it just hangs loading metadata and does not display the photo and eventually displays an unable to load message. It’s not every photo, but more often than not it is failing and seems to be photo dependent.
All photos have been exported from Adobe Lightroom in exactly the same way often as a batch and some in the batch will load and other won’t. All the metadata looks OK, file size does not appear to be a factor and I can open up the photos in any other application I try.
It seems like a problem iNaturalist is now having with some photos. Any suggestions?
If you try to upload the same photo again do you get the same error, or does it just randomly fail within a larger batch? You could try emailing an example photo that failed to help@inaturalist.org and they often help to try and troubleshoot the issue.
If a photo won’t upload it doesn’t matter how often I try. I’ve tried changing the name, same result. Two photos of the same subject taken within a matter seconds, with exactly the same metadata except for the slight difference in observation time and both about the same size, I find that one uploads and the other doesn’t. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of size as sometimes the larger photo will upload and the smaller one doesn’t.
I’ve uploaded over 300 photos using the same process over the past couple of weeks without a problem but in the past couple of days it has been happening about 50% of the time.
@Andill I’m sorry to hear that. It’s tough to diagnose an issue without a few more specific details, so it would be helpful if you could
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send a screenshot of what you are seeing (instructions for how to do so are in the About the Bug Reports thread)
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send one or two of the photos to help@inaturalist.org
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let us know if you have had any changes to your browser or network
Not the same problem, but maybe related. I find that with Microsoft Edge things come to a complete standstill sometimes while uploading and all I can do in such instances is to restart the PC. (Even alt-cntrl-del does not work in such cases) It especially happens when clicking on location. With Google Chrome this never happens. . All with latest Windows10.
Yeah, unfortunately both Edge and Safari don’t comply to web standards like Chrome or Firefox do, so it’s more likely that errors will pop up when using them. It will be interesting to see what happens with Edge once it transitions to Chromium.
That’s great information to know Tony! I know iNat probably wouldn’t want to be seen as “endorsing” particular browsers, but a prominent mention of which browsers are “most compatible” with iNaturalist might help users to self-diagnose buggy behaviors like this one.
i think the clicking-on-location problem is probably a different issue than what was noted in the original post. tiwane suggests that maybe Edge and Safari aren’t complying with web standards, and that the noncompliance may be causing the issues. that might be true, though I’m not sure Firefox would be much more compliant than the other browsers, according to some sources (ex. https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html).
i don’t know how big the Edge + iNaturalist user base is, but if it’s significant enough, i think the Chromium version of Edge is available for early adopters (https://www.windowslatest.com/2019/04/08/download-and-install-microsoft-chromium-edge-on-windows-10/), and it might be prudent for someone to actually try iNaturalist on that version of Edge sooner than later, to see if Chromium bones actually does resolve some of the known problems when using the website on Edge now.
i bring this up because i think iNaturalist uses Google for its maps, the clicking-on-location problem is related to maps, and there have been murmurings of Google sites and services not working well on non-Google browsers for no good reason, even the ones that run on Chromium. i don’t know how well-founded all the murmurings are, except that YouTube lagginess on Firefox and Edge seem to be real and well-documented (and the root of that problem seems to be related to Google’s choice to use non-standard code, as opposed to lack of standards compliance attributable to Firefox or Edge): https://www.windowscentral.com/how-to-fix-slow-edge-youtube.
that said, if the Edge + iNaturalist user base is not significant, then i guess i wouldn’t blame iNaturalist staff for not prioritizing Edge compability.