Data downloads from projects with long names can be difficult to work with on Windows

[timhicks-ala]

Some BioCollect projects have particularly long names, and those names become part of the folder structure when you request a download archive of a project's data. In some cases, this has caused issues on computers running Windows that have a limit (256 characters) on the total length of a filepath including folder and file names. A symptom of this is attempting to extract files from a .zip file and seeing a misleading error message suggesting the file is invalid (example attached). A recent instance of this issue was caused by a project with a name of 61 characters in length.

A work-around that has been suggested to affected users is to instead use alternative software such as 7-Zip. Once the contents have been extracted, they can be accessed/moved around/etc. A longer-term solution is to limit the length of BioCollect project titles, and/or to adjust the folder structure of a downloaded dataset (eg. activity names and image or record IDs) to reduce path length that way.