App version number : 0.55.3
Operating System / Device : iOS 18.2 / iPhone 13 Pro
Description of problem :
iNat Next struggles to upload.
Even leaving my phone plugged in overnight, it only uploads 5 and then stops.
I have to quit the app and restart to upload each 5, leading to a huge backlog all the time.
This is after I left it uploading overnight :
Do you really have 351 un-uploaded observations? Are you experiencing this problem when you have, say, 10 unuploaded observations?
Yes and yes I believed so
Or well… 320 or so right now this second - but see older screenshot above
There is always a big backlog
Although just trying it this morning it seemed to work a little smoother for some reason - it went up to 19 uploads
Once I put the app in the background though it stops uploading…that is part of the problem
Leaving the app running without putting in the background …. for an hour just now, it uploaded 28
See timestamps :
I’m still trying to determine if this is a bug or just something deeply improbable, but try this as a quick fix: find the un-uploaded observation that has this photo and delete it. LMK if that works or not.
Ok I deleted that one …
This time 19 uploads and 2 fails before it hangs …it stops going further after 15 minutes or so :
See timestamps :
What sort of upload speeds should I be seeing?
And should it upload in the background even when the app is minimized?
Closing and restarting after that it stopped after 10 minutes at 37 uploads and then hanged… Waiting longer there was 1 upload failed added
See timestamps :
I am still seeing requests in the logs to connect that photo to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/253963010. You might try deleting that observation from the website first and trying again.
FWIW, I don’t think this has anything to do with speed. You’ve got an observation photo with a bad unique identifier and that’s why you’re seeing that error message, but I don’t have enough info to know why the entire upload process hangs like that. It might be a memory issue. We can try and replicate with 100+ observations but this kind of thing is pretty tricky / slow to work on.
For whatever reason it seemed smoother toward the end and the backlog is cleared now.
I’m not currently experiencing the issue, it seems very smooth right now.
But I believe the issue existed before I had the backlog too fwiw… and wasn’t connected to the number of observations.
But then maybe it was that single observation you mention in part.
I deleted it now.
Thankyou for the help!
I think part of the reason for the backlog btw is that if I add 20 observations, I don’t then wait for them to upload before adding the next 20…so those that don’t instantly upload accumulate.
Is there a reason the app doesn’t carry on uploading in the background?
Would be good to have the option to allow it do that.
Also wondered what caused the uploads to fail so often(?)
It seemed pretty regular for me since using iNat Next that there were 1 or 2 failed uploads visible. Maybe that’s my memory playing tricks on me.
As again, seems smooth right now… not visible this morning.
when this happened to me It was because the app wasn’t getting the time of my phone and getting a random time (sometimes in the future) and gave me this errors . I had to curate all the photo times manually.
Fwiw, the failed uploads continue.
They seem to be when I move out of the app whilst the uploads are ongoing.
Even if the app can´t run entirely in the background when one chooses…it would be good if the uploads didn´t stop the moment I change app.
I am not fully closing it… just switching to a separate app.
Mainly because neither of the legacy apps do that and at one point in the long history of iNat Next we were using parity with the legacy apps as a goal. Supporting continuous upload in the background is one of the many things on our TODO list for iNat Next, but like so much of iNat, I can’t say where it fits in our priorities.
Also wondered what caused the uploads to fail so often(?)
As far as I can tell there’s a problem with generating unique IDs that we need to fix. In theory it should be impossible for two installations of the app to create the same “unique” ID but it seems to have happened in your case. Again, a fix is on our TODO list.
Good to know!
Not sure what you mean here. You mean all the failed uploads are somehow due to having the legacy version as well as iNat Next installed?
Or you just mean that single one you told me to delete?
I mean you were trying to upload a record with an identifier that was supposed to be unique, but it already belonged to another record. Sort of like your app was saying to iNat, “here’s a photo named 1234” and then iNat replied saying, “Sorry, someone else already made a photo named 1234, so I can’t accept your photo.” Theoretically that should never happen because the app should be coining identifiers that are almost guaranteed to be unique, but in practice it happened in your case, so we need to figure out why.
Ah right I see.
Maybe it´s something to do with what happens when I step in and out of the app…as that´s what seems to cause the failed uploads more generally.
Also connected to this…
If I close the app and reopen and proceed with uploading the older observations…like this:
If I add new observations whilst this is happening, rather than adding them to the queue, it sort of sees them as a new batch and forgets about the old ones
I have to close the app completely and restart uploading for it to see the total number of observations still waiting to upload.
It would be great if the uploads could continue whilst doing other things in the app, but I guess this is another thing for down the line perhaps :) …
