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Gps tracking

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rbeamish1

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Jan 9, 2016
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Bluff City Tn
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I was watching one of the B&H videos on lightroom and the speaker talks of taking reference photos with a gps enabled device such as a smartphone and using that to use the gps corridates. He also demonstrated a smartphone for creating gps tracks and downloading them to the map module into Lightroom. Does anyone have knowledge of such an app?
 
Depends what smartphone you are using. I've used an app called 'GeoTagr' on my iPhone to create track logs. It works quite well, but you have to be a bit careful with your phone battery. Leaving the GPS on all the time depletes it quite quickly.
 
I use an app on my iPhone called GPX Master. I have it save .gpx files straight to my Dropbox account and then import them into Lightroom to geotag my images. Whatever app you choose, make sure you synchronize the time on your phone to the time on your camera.
 
I use a map app Galileo on my iPhone. Besides recording GPS tracks it also offers offline maps for pretty much the whole world based on the open source OpenStreenMaps. Since out in areas without cell phone service this is useful.

As Johan says GPS will use your whole battery in about 8 hours. So when Im out traveling I will use a Mophie battery case. This gives me double battery capacity with very little additional size and weight.

-louie
 
I (using an android) usually have the app GPS Logger active when I want to create tracks with an interval of 2 minutes, this is a good way to save battery.

I still though pull my location data from Google Location History for each day I have been travelling, this enables me to use detailed location for those times I had active GPS signal and coarse location when my GPS wasn't active.

The data from Google is then imported into Lightroom and each photo is tagged in a batch.

Sent from my vk6050s using Tapatalk
 
I've used a ton of GPS apps and devices to geolocate images, but I think the easiest by far is gps4cam.

You start it on the phone to track you. You can adjust the intervals for tracking, or even set it up so that you just shake the phone to record a spot if you don't wanna do a whole track. It's quite conservative with battery use as a consequence.

When you finish, you end the track and it shows a QR code. Take a photo of the QR code.

Back on your computer, using gps4cam's desktop software (or HoudahGeo) you find the photos you've copied off the SD card. It reads the QR code and uses the info to georeference your images. I use HoudahGeo cuz it gives me some options after that to say adjust on a map cuz I had a poor GPS signal, or write to some non-standard locaton, but you could do some of that in Lr itself.

So no messing with adjusting the camera clock, etc. No importing GPX or other track files (although gps4cam saves them if you need them for a hiking app or something).

If you camera is wifi enabled the manufacturer's app should be able to record location and apply that in-camera.
 
If you have a prosumer or better Canon or Nikon, getting a dedicated GPS device for the camera eliminates the extra tracking steps and writes the coordinates into the EXIF automatically.
 
I have all my cameras set to Universal Time. Regardless of where in the world I am I do not change it. This simplifies mapping gps tracks to my images, if required, as I do not have to worry about summer time, or changing my camera every time I change a time zone.

More Recently.
I have a bucket load of gps devices, which I used to keep gps trails and then complicate my workflow to incorporate this in my processing.

Now, if I need gps co-ordinates for a specific location I just take a photo with my iphone, which records the gps in it's metadata. Now, these devices are gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. I suspect the next generation of cameras may have this feature as standard (or some of them will).

I know everyone will have different needs and this may not suit all.
 
Yeah, I've gone back and forth on the UTC thing. Maybe if I lived closer to Greenwich I'd be into it, but the problem where I live is that with a 7-8 hour difference I get date changes as a result, which can be a mess. And I'm often going over a time zone boundary in the course of a relatively short interval between shots. So I still have to deal with that, since people viewing many of the photos I shoot expect them to sort with theirs, so that all the dinner and sunset shots are reasonably together, etc.

The other complication is that some software will use (and sometimes insert) local time as determined by the computer the software is running on, and that can go into some time namespaces in metadata. Some time is recorded with time zone, some isn't. So be careful.

Finally, if you're using a camera or sometimes wifi equipped cameras and have the feature to set camera time by GPS then when you flick it on everything changes except the shots you already took. So remember to leave that feature off (if you can, and don't ask me how I know about it...doh!).

Now that I have wifi equipped cameras I've gone back to local time; just makes post work easier since that seems to be the assumption for what's recorded in the image. Plus adding local time is adding the info about what time zone you're in; when I used UTC if I didn't have location info I'd have to infer the zone to get local time. If we got something that could automatically detect time zone we'd be better off in that regard, but for now you need to enter it or record it in some way (a smartphone shot, as suggested, since they are better at getting the zone, at least in populated areas with reception).
 
That is why I do not bother with GPS tracks any more. A simple iphone shot of the scene gives me gps co-ordinates if I think I might need them.
 
My Nikon compensates for time zone. I simply tell the camera when I change a timezone. And when DST starts or stops. I've only encountered time shifts when I forget to set a DST change. Easy enough to fix in LR though. I've traveled to UTC , EST, CST & MST All I need to know is what time zone I am in and the camera adjusts from UCT Both UTC and the Local Time are stored in the EXIF if your camera sets the time properly to UTC.
I have a Solmeta GPS for the Nikon. When it is in use, it corrects the current UTC based upon the time stamp it gets from the satellites.
 
Good to see intelligence applied to a real world problem. (Ps I shoot Canon and Sony and see that Solmeta have a version for Canon.... useful to know if I want to get back to gps tracking)
 
I use a separate device with long battery life (24-42 hours). I use geosetter to sync, then import in Lightroom/ or update metadata. I know this can be done in LR but adjusting the sync time to your camera is so easy on geosetter. I quite like getting the tracks as well so I have a road map of the holidays.


Verzonden vanaf mijn iPhone met Tapatalk
 
All my cameras also have time zone setting. Actually, two settings: home and world. And that brings up a complication I forgot: some cameras will change your default video settings depending on where in the world you say you are. Or do a "world" setting vs "home" setting to differentiate the two. Aargh; another feature I hadn't noticed until it bit me.

And something else I forgot about gps4cam, which is relevant in time zone travel. Many applications (like geosetter, or Lr) require you to get real time in order to get an offset to use to synch the real times of the the GPS track or waypoint to the photo time as set by the usually inaccurate camera clock. Many take a photo of say the smartphone's clock. And then look at that later to do the offset. The cool thing about gps4cam is that it incorporates the GPS track into and time zone and real time into the QR code, so you don't have to do anything but photograph the QR code and let the gps4cam application find it. Even long after the trip. It does all the rest; you don't need to do any synching yourself or even reset your camera's time zone. So if you travel to a new time zone you're covered. And usually the phone knows what zone it's in, unlike the camera.
 
If you have a prosumer or better Canon or Nikon, getting a dedicated GPS device for the camera eliminates the extra tracking steps and writes the coordinates into the EXIF automatically.
+1 here. I use a GPS tracker that plugs into the 10-pin data port on my Nikon D3. If I go indoors, it uses the coordinates of the last location outdoors. Vendor is Solmeta, but there are other vendors out there. If I preview the image on the back of my camera and check the histogram and the EXIF data, I can see the GPS coordinates.

Phil
 
Another benefit of some in camera or attached GPS units is the ability to record more data. Combined with in camera (or in-GPS-dongle) sensors the camera can record orientation and compass heading, so you know where it's pointed. Some even include POI info so that the camera can do reverse geolocation and add city, etc to the IPTC info. Some can even include basic maps so you can use the camera itself for basic navigation. A Panny camera I used could output KML files so I could track us on Google Earth.

But the coolest use of GPS IMHO is the Pentax Astrotracer feature. It uses the orientation and GPS info to move the sensor in relation to the sky's motion like an astronomical mount, so that it tracks celestial objects. It can only move so far, of course, but it can allow longer lenses to be used effectively for good astro shots.

I suppose some day we'll have a camera with augmented heads up viewing that will ID the object we're taking a picture of. You can already do that to a certain extent with smartphones.
 
A trap door to be aware of - I use Downloader Pro to import images from my camera memory card and geotag the images from a gps track from my Garmin GPS. Thought I was being clever a while back when the gps changed time zones as we traveled, I changed the camera times to match the current time zone. When I got home and downloaded all the images using Downloader Pro to geotag the images as it imported / converted to DNG files, all images taken in a time zone other than where my computer was as it downloaded the images were off by an hour in their location. Seems the tracklog is actually in UTC and the computer converts to local time as it works with the tracklog. We are in Pacific Time - all my images from the Mountain Timezone (Yellowstone etc.) were geotagged with a location an hour different from where they were taken. Makes sense in hindsight, but at the time, I thought I was making the right move setting the cameras to the current local time. Now I just leave them set on Pacific time and all is well. (there are ways in Downloader Pro to tell it to use a different time offset, but then you have to know which images were shot in which timezone).

mikey
 
I still though pull my location data from Google Location History for each day I have been travelling, this enables me to use detailed location for those times I had active GPS signal and coarse location when my GPS wasn't active.

I'm new to this and I'm testing to see if Lightroom is able to process years / 190MB of Google Location History.

Getting LR to process 32K images against that much location data seems to be taking hours or not working at all. When I click on "Auto-Tag Photos", a message "No matching photos" show up briefly and it seems true. When I try to close the application, I get "There is a task in progress: "Auto-Tag Photos using Tracklog"".

Do you think if I should wait longer or try another approach?
 
I would suggest extracting one day at a time from and parsing in Lightroom.
It is a lot more work, but leaves you in control.

Sent from my YD201 using Tapatalk
 
I've figured it out.

You must select only the images that do not have GPS location metadata set before you click "Auto-Tag Photos".
 
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