Web uploader drops observations from batch

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) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/247770400

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.): Over the last week I have been uploading many observations in batches of 4-12 observations and have noticed quite regularly that one, sometimes two, of the observations are not saved. The URL above is the most recent which was only saved at the second attempt. I reported this issue many months ago but don’t recall a fix having been issued.

Step 1: Prepare 6 observations for submission

Step 2: Click the submit button

Step 3: Result: 2 observations missing

Both missing observations were sucessfully saved on a second attempt.

I also experienced this issue this past week and occasionally in the past. It is easiest to detect when uploading a small batch of new records and checking that each one appeared. It could be happening frequently with large batch uploads and not noticed without tediously checking every attempted uploaded record.

Sometimes I refresh the Your Observations page (link at the top of most iNat web pages) to check that the new records appeared. There is sometimes a cache issue where the record list doesn’t update when refreshing the page, whose URL hasn’t changed. I then flip an irrelevant search filter (e.g. change High Rank from High to Kingdom) to change the URL in a way that should still display the new records, and then the new records can appear. But sometimes only a few of the new records appear, and I think it’s because other new records weren’t saved.

I do a second check, opening the most recent record’s (by Date Added) observation detail page and using the green < and > buttons above the map to look through the sequence of recently added records. That most recent record has only the < button active and the > button inactive. I click on the < button, and then as the next most recently added record loads, I click that button again, and so on. Some of the new records appear and others do not. I then conclude that some records were never saved.

I don’t know of any indicator on the Add Observations web page to highlight which records did not save. So then it is tedious to figure out which records need to be reattempted.

I haven’t been able to replicate.

Here are some questions that might help us narrow this down.

  • are you using any extension with Chrome?
  • have you tried using other browsers?
  • are you adding observations to projects, or adding fields or tags to the observations?
  • how are you combining multiple images into one observation: drag and drop, or via the Combine button?

Hi Tony,

Shame you can’t replicate.

I can’t determine any difference between those that got saved and those that didn’t but I have a gut feeling that it was usually the second and/or third observation in a batch that got dropped.

Today I tried to replicate this issue with the same photo set that demonstrated the issue about a week ago. They are the same 20 photos combined by drag and drop into the same 6 observations. The photos are tagged with identifications and geographical info. The IDs of 3 of the records are recognized automatically, and I have to manually enter the IDs of the other 3. I do not add any annotations or observation fields nor add the observations to a project on the upload page.

Firefox 131.0.3 today, this or a recent earlier version previously. Windows 10 up to date as of 2-3 weeks ago.

On 3 tries today, the first try saved 4 of 6 observations correctly (2 disappeared), and the second and third tries saved all 6 observations (none disappeared). On my previous try a week or so ago, 4 of 6 saved (2 disappeared).

In the two tries where 2 observations disappeared, 1 lost observation from the first try was in common with a lost observation from the second try. The second lost observation in each try differed. So which observations didn’t get saved is not fully consistent even with the same photo set.

And you see no error message, correct? There should be one. How long do you wait before trying to re-upload the missing observations?

@mrtnlowr What happens if you turn off extensions and try uploading?

Just tried uploading 15 observations in one batch with all extensions turned off. Curiously all succeeded, although I’m not sure that helps since even with extensions turned on that can sometimes happen.

@treichard Do you have any of the same extensions? (see my previous posting)

Correct, I saw no error message on the uploader page. The uploader page redirected on its own to the next page after it thought it had finished saving the new observations.

When I did the experiment with the three tries, I also checked if the two unsaved records from the previous week had since surfaced. They had not.