As it was explained, no accuracy indicated in meta data, it could be imprecise.
Even if precise it makes observation less verifiable without range of accuracy, so lower quality of data.
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i think most of the camera apps just take whatever the phone says is the location. so the location you get is just the last location the phone decided to figure out a location. you can force the phone to find a location though. just open up your preferred map application, and locate yourself. then open up your camera app to take a photo. theoretically, you could get a location that is more accurate than what the iNaturalist app will determine, but the camera app may not actually record the horizontal positioning error value. so tradeoffs, i guess.
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Thatâs not hard to add accuracy though, the fastests way if you connect phone to computer and add photos that way, then in uploader you choose them all, click, and fill the accuracy. Or just when you upload observation you choose location an move the circle a little bit and accuracy shows.
Well, it will be just guessing, not accurate data.
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Itâs always guessing, iNat app doesnât record accurate accuracy if you think it does, it records what your phone says and itâs never a big circle, you always can check the map, even with changing map versions change is about a couple of metres.
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Well, youâre wrong on this, it can give a large range of accuracy if not enough time to determine it or struggling to connect with satellites, my previous phone was often giving accuracy of over 1000m, but new model is faster and more precise it always gives it within 10 m, but sometimes it needs a minute or two to make it more accurate than few tens of meters.
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Well, when it has not enough time it can show youâre in another town, so weâre talking about normal circumstances and yeah, itâs never more than 10 metres, so you can use them to satisfy all observations where pin is in right place, though I use 3 metres if I know itâs totally right.
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something that i donât think most people understand is that the accuracy value provided is not really meant to be 100% accurate itself. if you have have a location with an accuracy value of 9m, as determined by the Android phone / iNat app, it doesnât mean that your true location will necessarily be within 9m of that stated point. the way that the Android team defines it, it means that you can be 68% confident that the true location is within 9m of that point.
you can see this if you stand in one spot, get a location for a new observation with the iNat app, and then while still at the same spot, get edit and get the location again. a lot of the time, the new location will be outside of the circle â sometimes significantly so.
my understanding is that the iNat app stops trying to refine the location accuracy as soon as Android says the accuracy value is 10m or less. but given enough time / sampling, a lot of phones nowadays are capable of 1m or less in some conditions. so if you were to use an app that continually asks Android to refine the location (rather than limiting it at 10m), then you could probably get a much more accurate location than the iNaturalist app will provide.
thatâs what i meant earlier by:
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I donât really understand whatâs your point here. I was not saying that it is 100% accurate, I was saying that it is more accurate and more verifiable than coordinates from the meta data in photo. Should we not care about accuracy at all if we canât get 100%? My current phone often gives accuracy of 3-4 m for iN app if good mobile signal available in addition to satellites and if not inside buildings. Where I was able to check it - it was always within circles. My previous phone was often stopping detecting coordinates way before getting to 10 m, so it was necessary to re-run checking of coordinates, usually it was giving 10-20 m in second attempt. So it depends.
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my point is simply that âmore accurateâ is debatable depending on how youâre defining it. âmore verifiableâ might be a better description of what you get from the iNat app.
you and melodi_96 were debating different methods to determine a location and accuracy value. youâre both letting the phone determine the location, but in slightly different ways. and youâre letting the app / phone determine the accuracy value, while melodi_96 is assigning one manually after the fact.
my point is that with your method, youâre theoretically getting 68% confidence that the true location is within that accuracy circle; while melodi_96 might actually be getting a higher percentage of her true locations actually falling within her manually defined 10m accuracy circles â because her locations are potentially determined based on more samples than what the iNat app will get you. that said, itâs not possible to say for sure whether she is effectively getting better locations or not without actually doing some sort of rigorous comparison.
from my own experience, i think the point locations recorded in EXIF in my phoneâs camera app are more consistently true than what the iNat app will provide.
iâm not saying either method is superior, just that there are pros and cons with each approach.
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For privacy issues I have location services turned off for most things on my iPhone, only leaving it on for select apps that are specifically related to location based issues.
This means that my photos donât have any location data associated with them if I take them normally, but I have location services turned on for iNat, so if I take the photos in iNat then there is a location associated with them.
Regardless, I pretty much always adjust the location by hand anyway, so for me itâs not an issue, but I can see how some folks would feel differently.
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Iâve noticed that even regular non-macro photos with main camera are mostly much better in the default camera app than that in iN app (due to AI?). So basically iN app is useless now, especially if to accept comments above that coordinates from meta data are ok, one can upload the photos through a browser and not clutter up a phone with useless apps. So why would you not close off your app if it canât properly support cameras of modern phones anyway?
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That tone wonât help you solve your problems. AI canât affect photo quality but any photo on iNat is sized, so when you upload from any source photos will be not more than certain quality, iNat isnât a place to store photos AI thereâs no need to have them take more place.
Well, maybe you should google whatâs AI, it enhances focus among other things and has nothing to do with size of resulting files.
though Iâm very happy that iN is instead a place to store countless photos of cats, dogs, pigeons and crows
What? All that you listed are perfectly fine observations.
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