In writing my new app to download observations, I noticed that quite a lot of observations had differing date values for created_at and observed_on. Most of them seemed to differ by 1 day, and that seems explainable by someone observing something on their device, then syncing the next day.
However, a lot of them differ by many more than one day, sometimes even by years.
Does anyone know what usage or data entry pattern would explain this? I can imagine a scenario where someone is out in the field with a notepad, maybe a camera, and records an observation. Then, years later, going over old notes, they enter them manually into iNat. Do you think that kind of thing accounts for these large date differences?
Any iNatters who are going on longer hikes or vacation trips are likely using a DSLR to take their iNat photos and will then be uploading them on the website after they return. If they take raw photos then they’ll have to convert them, they may want to edit and geotag the photos, etc. It will take most people a few days at least to get that all done after a longer trip, personally it takes longer than that.
Someone in my area has recently been uploading digitized versions of old film photos of reptiles and amphibians from the 80s. Really cool to see documentation of some rare species that used to be more common decades ago.
From my experience, I just recently joined- but have had photos saved for years and years, which I add whenever I find or remember them. Others have so many photos for the same reason that they can only add a few at a time. Those people with thousands of observations? Whose careers involve photography and such? So, I think it’s just that people add their pictures very very late. It’s hard to go through thousands of pictures individually in a day!!
Many of us take photos with cameras not phones and upload our pics to a computer and then to iNat. Might be days, months or even years before they are submitted to iNat. As @upupa-epops said, some of us have digital or scanned slide photos that date back before iNat existed.
Personally I don’t use the app on my phone all that much except for some plant photos. Those usually get submitted pretty quickly.
A few years ago I surveyed a huge tract of land where the boundary goes from a forked pine tree to a post oak to a nail in a rock near a tuliptree. I took pictures of these trees, but didn’t post them to iNat until I joined iNat. That explains the delay of years.
My delay is usually several days; not only do I have to get them off the camera’s SD card, but then I have to figure out which coordinates go with which pictures and convert the coordinates from state plane to lat/long.
I got my first DSLR in 2006 and started to make photos everything interesting around me. In 2019 I knew about iNat, but didn’t upload much. Now, especially in summer, I make so many photos and have so little spare time so I upload observations from August in November.
last year after I began regulary using iNat I went back through over 20years of old photographs looking for any animals I could ID and place/date and uploaded them.
Some folks might delay posting an iNat record if the subject organism is sensitive for some reason and they want to keep others from rushing to the site to find it. I haven’t done that but I can imagine that happening, such as for bird nest sites.
As an aside, I almost never take a pic and upload with the phone app at the same time since I like to examine the photo(s) and crop or otherwise edit them first. Sometimes that’s days later. I find on those occasions when I photo’d and submitted at the same time, the pictures were terrible. You can’t always tell if your photo is any good when you’re out in the field and the sun is shining on your phone screen.
Late last year I spent a couple of days in lyrebird territory, heard them, caught a glimpse of them a couple of times but never managed to snap them. I uploaded a photo from a previous trip years ago instead, as a reminder.
On the same trip, I made about 4500 photos, most of them for iNat. It took me months to process it all. Currently I am only a couple of week behind.
I does not help that I settled on a two camera setup, one zoom bridge and TG-7 for close-ups. I need to match up the photos from both for a lot of observations.