Geotaggers

[Sultanpepa]

I'm thinking a geotagger would be handy when photographing in other countries. Does anyone use one, are they reliable, and does anyone have a recommendation for one? Nikons own make doesn't get good reviews.

[chrumu]

I use my phone for geotagging. No additional device, no additional battery to charge, plus the assisted GPS of a phone gets a much faster fix on the position than a plain GPS device.

 

 

Christoph

[Sultanpepa]

I use my phone for geotagging. No additional device, no additional battery to charge, plus the assisted GPS of a phone gets a much faster fix on the position than a plain GPS device.

 

 

Christoph

I take it you use wi-fi to connect and save location to the exif?

[MDM]

Not a mobile phone expert but most if not all smartphones have an inbuilt GPS that uses satellite for location and embeds directly in the metadata of stills taken with the phone. It doesn't use WIFI. I have a now aging iPhone4S and I have found the GPS a bit iffy at times (that may be because it is necessary to calibrate the GPS before use). It's had me in the middle of the Sahara and I've never set foot on continental Africa. The disadvantage of a phone if used as a proper navigational GPS rather than simply embedding location data in a location snapshot is that the batteries run out quickly.

 

But if used to simply embed the metadata in a location snapshot and if the GPS is working properly, then a phone is excellent for this purpose. I don't know if there is any automatic way of correlating the phone data with image data from a DSLR based on time taken - I expect there should be apps for this. When I get around to it, I do it manually.

 

I have a proper trekker's GPS for walking which I use frequently. This has extra features over a phone GPS but it has its problems as well - it cuts out completely when the batteries run low and it won't restart on a change of batteries without plugging it into a computer. A pain for sure - I need to check it out and I may need to update the firmware.

[Vincent Lowe]

I have an EasyTagger - http://the-gadgeteer.com/2012/03/27/easytag-easytagger-gps-unit-for-nikon-cameras-review/.

It has in inbuilt compass and will read the lens focal length so that the angle of view, as well as direction, can be viewed with software such as Geosetter.




Downsides - the compass has to be calibrated (by rotating 360 degrees) every time it's switched on and it has to be held horizontally for the compass to work properly. So I tend to use it only when I'm travelling in the car.

The company doesn't seem to exist any more, their website just shows this - http://e-geotag.com/ but I expect similar units are on the market.

[IanGibson]

I'm thinking a geotagger would be handy when photographing in other countries. Does anyone use one, are they reliable, and does anyone have a recommendation for one? Nikons own make doesn't get good reviews.

 

 

I've used a couple of geotagging smartphone apps in the past, but to be honest, I've found that the extra steps in the import workflow weren't worth the bother as I don't need to know exactly where each shot was taken - the name of the town is sufficient for my purposes. I can work out the street names later from Google Maps and I often take a photo of street signs if necessary.  Another downside to using the smartphone app option is you have to remember to adjust your camera time to the phone time as this is how the geotagging works; the phone knows where you were, and when, and the camera knows when the photo was taken.  It's easy to forget to adjust the time on the camera if you are crossing timezones.

 

Nowadays, I simply take a photo with my smartphone whenever I change location and refer to the location data from the smartphone photo to keyword the camera image.

 

Another option I have used in the past is an Eye Fi SD card.  These do work tolerably well (you need to be somewhere which has wifi, though you don't need to log on to it - the card notes the SSID of the local wifi router(s), and will correlate that information and write the geo location to the EXIF file when you get back home).

[DHill]

I've used two external GPS units over the years - one by Solmeta and one by Opteka (who now seem to call themselves Viltrox). Build quality wasn't great and both failed within a short time. Nowadays I use a mobile phone app. I've tried a few; I've now settled on GPSLogger (for Android) because that has a very efficient workflow - it can be set to automatically upload to a Dropbox folder, from which GPS data can easily be attached to image metadata in Lightroom. 

 

I've also tried the approach of using Google Maps after the fact, without a GPS tracklog, but find that very time consuming. The mobile phone method is slightly less efficient than the external GPS unit (perhaps take 5 mins or less per trip), but in my experience is more robust - and is cheaper if you already have a suitable phone.

 

David.  

[chrumu]

 

I use my phone for geotagging. No additional device, no additional battery to charge, plus the assisted GPS of a phone gets a much faster fix on the position than a plain GPS device.

 

 

Christoph

I take it you use wi-fi to connect and save location to the exif?

 

 

 

I'm sorry for my very brief answer this morning; I was just moving out of WiFi coverage and still wanted to answer.

 

Usually I use Endomondo (available for free for iOS and Android) to track my workouts and also as a GPS logger for pictures. Upon completion of a workout/logging session, the GPS track is uploaded automatically to the Endomondo website. The upload is very robust, so if you don't have mobile data (abroad, or in a remote Alpine location), the tracks are uloaded as soon as you have coverage again. Never lost a single track in all the years I've been using it. Then I log in on the Endomondo website, export the track as gpx file, and annotate it to the picture exif data by using Lightroom.

 

 

Side remark to MDM and in general: The initial GPS fix ("fix" is in this context the usual term for determining the location) often takes long because the phone or GPS tracker first needs quite some data transmitted by the GPS satellites to determine its location, but the data transmission is very slow. To improve this, iPhone 4S and virtually all modern phones with GPS have built in assisted GPS (A-GPS, or GPS-A). "Assisted" means that the GPS base station transmits its own GPS coordinates to the phone, as well as some of the data which is usually transmitted by the satellites. This way, the phone already knows its approximate location and most of the info needed to calculate its exact location, therefore the final GPS fix is much faster than with a plain GPS device. This of course only works if you have mobile coverage (mobile data not needed).

 

 

 

(In my first full time job after university I developed mobile phone processors)

 

Christoph

[MDM]

Very interesting - thanks for posting that Christoph.

[fotoDogue]

You can tag photos in Lightroom using the Map module, either individually or batches. 

Here's a tutorial for Lightroom 4 but it seems to work in 5.7 as well.

 

https://photographylife.com/mastering-lightroom-how-to-geotag-photographs

[Sultanpepa]

I've been looking at a second generation Solmeta device but now thinking twice after David's comments. I've used google maps till now but recently had difficulty with images taken during a two day train journey, especially as that trip was some time ago and memories had faded. I got there in the end but a geotracker would have been ideal in that situation for positioning data. The mobile phone option while interesting would add a workflow that I'd rather not have to deal with and I don't have lightroom as yet anyway. The Solmeta device uses the camera's battery which is good as I wouldn't have to worry about charging the thing while traveling. I carry spare camera batteries so no problem there. It's a simple matter of plugging it into camera, sliding it on the hot shoe and presumably forgetting about it thereafter until finished. I'll give it some more thought before deciding but I'd like to thank you all for the comments so far. 

 

Cheers.

[dustydingo]

When I'm traveling, I always take the time to use a small notepad and pencil. It does seems so . . . old fashioned? . . . but hey, it works perfectly every single time.

 

I also photograph street signs, plaques etc etc, as others have suggested.

 

dd

[Lisa]

I use my iPhone 'Notes' yellow pad App that every iPhone comes with, to keep track each day, where I went, and what I saw, in sequential order as I travel along on vacation. But I don't monitor my GPS. My notes are just for future captioning and key words in case I forget where I was and what I saw. 

[Matt Limb]

When I'm traveling, I always take the time to use a small notepad and pencil. It does seems so . . . old fashioned? . . . but hey, it works perfectly every single time.

 

I also photograph street signs, plaques etc etc, as others have suggested.

 

dd

 

Dusty

 

Could not agree more, a note pad and pencil - not pen as a pencil can often still write on damp paper - should be in every camera bag and we can all be guilty of making a simple task to hard.

 

Yes, I do have a smartphone app - do I use it, rarely; it gobbles up 'phone battery power and in the most remote locations, when you need it the most it does not work, but I can read the Log and Lat Setting on my phone and make a note, along with captions, keywords and any other important points ready to input to Lighroom

[Alexandre Fagundes]

I use geotagohotos, an app for the iphone for a while now.

You have to sync the time with the camera and than just start the program.

It does drain some battery, but my iphone will last a day in a trip if I am not using it for other stuff

Later you just download your images and run a desktop application that geotag your photos, its fast and easy

It saves me a lot of time to find out later the names of the places I took photos of