Platform: Android 5.1, Google Photos
In the time I’ve been in iNaturalist, I usually had to manually add in location data for observations from memory, which would mean locations were often inaccurate.
Recently, I changed my camera app’s settings to collect location data (geotag) for photos. Sure enough, when I uploaded some photos it showed their location data, but the date and time didn’t transfer over. I could bring back the data and time by disabling location data again.
I usually take pictures with my phone’s camera, Open Camera: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforge.opencamera&hl=en
The photos are transferred to Google Photos. To avoid hassling with Google’s wacky policies, I download the photos onto my computer and then upload them back onto iNaturalist.
I did some investigating and looked at the data of downloaded images before and after the change. Here’s image data from an image before I enabled location data:
This is image data from after I enabled location data:
From there it’s obvious the metadata for both time and location are stored in the geotagged photo, and that there’s likely a problem in the upload process to iNaturalist itself. My first suspicion was that maybe the “GPSDateStamp” and “Datetime” fields (which display the same information) were creating conflict, but the other image also had multiple date and time instances as well.
I don’t know whether this is specific to this version of Android or the certain camera app, but if all else fails I can always work with another app or something.
