Upload form does not always incorporate date and time from photo exif information when the photo is added

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) : Firefox

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/):

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: click the upload button. select the photo to incorporate and click twice on it. the photo appears in the upload form. the date and time from the photo metadata should appear in the date/time box, but sometimes it does not appear. Sometimes it does appear, but it is the wrong date, or, more often, the time is wrong. This happens randomly - sometimes only a few times in a set of uploads, sometimes it’s nearly all of the individual observations in a set of uploads. It would seem that if the correct date/time info transfers from the photo to the form once, it should do it for every photo being entered. Is there a setting I need to adjust?

Step 2:

Step 3:

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Can you please email some of these photos to help@inaturalist.org?

Are you processing your photos (e.g. cropping/resizing) on your computer before you upload them? Some photo editing software and/or settings may erase or change the EXIF data on the photos, i.e. the “save for web” function on older photoshop versions would do that. I occasionally use that on purpose when I want to obscure both the location and the exact time of the observation for heavily poached species to make it harder to trace from the photo data.

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Yes, I do usually process photos before uploading, in Lightroom. I’ll look for the ‘save for web’ function and turn it off if I find it. All of my uploads to iNat recently have included the EXIF data, including date and time, correctly. Thanks for the reply.

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