Howdy all! I must confess I’m a bit of an aspiring Luddite. I wish like anything that I didn’t have to carry my phone on me all the time. I think that, for my own interests, a lot of things could be covered by a portable CD Player and a notebook. I know I would need some sort of communicator for emergencies (I’m looking to get a Garmin InReach once I’ve saved up enough), but the other thing I’d really miss is the convenience of my iPhone camera. It’s relatively good quality, sure, but the metadata is (generally) great about the date and time, and more importantly for naturalist purposes, the GeoTag.
I realize that, if I had a locator like a garmin device, I could theoretically write down my location every time I took a photo on a standard digital camera & just manually match it up later. But that’s also really cumbersome if I want to take a lot of photos of a lot of things.
I understand that what I’m looking for might not even exist, but if it does, I imagine y’all would be the ones to know about it. Is there a camera I could get (ideally beginner friendly and compact, like a pocket camera) that has reliable time & date metadata and, more pressingly, a solid GeoTag? I would also love if it could also record video, even if it was only short videos.
I would especially love it if it could work when in remote areas. For instance, I spent about a month and a half in the jungle in 2024, during which time I rarely had any service or wifi & was usually on airplane mode, but most of the photos I took on my phone still had working geotags, so I could upload them to iNat later easily.
I’ve never owned a camera, but if I could get one that would have all these features, I’d be so happy!