I’m currently logging with the free GPXLogger app on an android phone, which seems to be very accurate and doesn’t jump around the way the default location services do. I then sync the tracklogs with the photos in lightroom, which is just a couple clicks.
I also just discovered that the nice old Garmin Etrex vista H I have that I had stopped using since Garmin’s windows 10 software has stopped supporting it (I can’t believe they would do that for dozens of models that are still out there in the world working perfectly) will cooperate with the free software EasyGPS to download GPX files to do the same tagging process, so I’ll probably go back to using that instead of my phone for long days. If anyone has an old GPS sitting around that isn’t officially supported on their current OS, EasyGPS can probably make it usable again.
I have been using the DSLR / GPS combination for several years as a way of mapping rare plants. By having my full track I can buffer it to make a survey polygon and then I buffer the appropriate photo locations to make an “occupied” polygon. This allows me to map multiple species in a single survey even when they partially overlap.
I have several small gps loggers but my favorite is the Holux M-241. It has a display that shows the time to seconds so I can sync my photo times very accurately by taking a photo of the clock. I’ve been keeping track and my Pentax K-x clock drifts about 30 seconds per month while the K-70 clock drifts by about 10 seconds per month. The Holux will also run for about 36 hours on a single rechargeable AA battery, my phone can’t even come close in remote areas where it’s struggling to find a signal.
I use Picmeta Photo Tracker to geotag after I’ve adjusted the photo times in Picasa. Picasa has a nice feature that lets you adjust the time of a group of photos by setting the actual time of the first photo and it calculates the difference and applies it to the rest. If the first photo is the picture of the clock on my gps it’s very easy to get it right.
Can anyone suggest a good GPS tracker for Android to do this. I tried to install one on the weekend, it worked only when I went to export the track got 2 things I did not appreciate (can’t export unless you agree to a monthly subscription and must link to Facebook).
Basically looking for
as mentioned Android
does not require a Facebook account, I don’t have one and am not creating one
prefer a 1 time purchase, not a subscription model
don’t care about being able to download maps, get recommendations etc, just want the track and be able to export it
Is there an instruction video for it ? And does this work on an iphone ? I use iphone and add other (better fotos) via the website if i can get better photos. Nowadays i do not use the android iNaturalist app.
From what you’re asking you might like GPXLogger. It’s dead simple- an interface that shows your gps location info (no map) and a couple buttons. You hit “record” to start the track, and when you’re done you hit “stop”. The app then saves the tracklog to a folder on your phone in the common .gpx format with the date in the filename, where you can do what you want with it (I plug my phone into my computer and download to import to lightroom).
I have a crappy Android LG K20 phone and it has an equally crappy camera so I use a cheap point and shoot with analog zoom but no GPS. I use the free GPX Recorder on the phone and free GPicSync on my Windows 7 machine.
Sorry, I believe it’s not possible on an iPhone. I just looked on my friend’s iPhone pretty thoroughly and could not find a way to do it. I know for certain that the Android iNaturalist app definitely has some other useful features (like side-by-side comparison of observation photos with photos of species suggested by the AI) that are not available with IOS, because I do have an iPad and also because I’ve done observations right next to friends with iPhones who can’t to the same things.
Just to clarify, on my friend’s iPhone I checked both her regular iPhone photo gallery and Google Photos app, and it didn’t seem possible from either app to create an iNaturalist observation by selecting photos and sharing it to the iNaturalist app. When I clicked on the share icon the iNat app was not an option.
Share? App? I do neither. I copy the photos from my camera or from or picassaweb.google.com or photos.google.com to my PC and upload (using the Upload button and drag and drop) them to iNaturalist in the browser. I tell people who are serious about iNaturalist not to use the app. I only use it when I’m out in the field and I’m curious what’s been observed in an area - assuming its not too bright out to read my phone’s screen.
Hi can this app email the GPX log?
Also who are the creators ‘Ear to Ear Oak’?
I tried some other apps Yesterday but Time Zone is out when loading the file onto a Windows Desktop app, would you know of any other free GPX viewers on Windows PC that can load the GPX data that displays all POI with the data at once?
GPX logger does not have a way to email the file in the app itself- it just records and then saves the file. The file is then in a folder in the internal storage of your phone- you can download it to your computer directly with a USB cable, or email as an attachment from an email app like Gmail. I don’t know anything about the app developers.
I also don’t know much about desktop gpx viewers. My default thought would be to try google earth.
There seems to be a free app for Windows PC called GPicSync which Geotaged my photos
I Selected GPX file (that I emailed to myself) than selected the Picture folder, than synchronise. After it’s completed it also created a Google Earth kml file which can be opened in the desktop version of Google Earth by clicking the button on the app, it didn’t work the 1st time so I dragged & dropped the KML file onto Google Earth Map
Yesterday when out in the bush reserve my GPS tracker didn’t record local time but this app seems to allow manual selection of my time zone.
Super happy I stumbled upon this thread, it’s going to save me hours! No more manually entering GPS coordinates in iNat. :)
I’m hoping someone who uses Darktable can help me out here. I successfully found and got a working tracker onto my phone, did the track and successfully exported it.
I’ve also successfully applied the track onto my photos in Darktable, if I go to the Map view function in Darktable as you can see here
I’ve watched a couple of YouTube vids, and read the documentation, yet when I upload the photos after having done this be it to iNat or Flicker etc, I get no associated geographic information loaded.
I’m guessing it may have something to do with the data being in separate files that are created with the process and not getting read, but I see nothing in the sample vids or documentation that suggests there is some additional step or config option I need to enable.
I used an Android app called ‘Easy GPS logger’ by leafdigital to make my GPX files (I could only find a paid ad-free version of GPX Logger in the Play Store), and then darktable to apply them to my photos. I only just tried it in the past couple days but it’s worked so far for two different outings and didn’t seem that complicated.
Is it possible that different apps would produce GPX files that work differently? Or if you use different types of photo files? I was converting raw images to jpgs.
That’s probably your issue right there (and out of curiousity- why get a RAW management/conversion software like Darktable and then not use it to convert your RAW files?).
Darktable embeds the gps info into the new jpegs it makes when you use the program to export jpegs converted from the original RAW or jpeg files that you imported to the program. However, it does not embed that info directly into the original files, because it’s a non-destructive editor- as in does not alter original files, just saves edits in a separate file that darktable reads when working with the file.
To have the gps info embedded, you need to export new jpegs from darktable, whether you’re importing RAWs or jpegs in the first place.
I already had a photo management process that I used which included conversion from raw to jpg. That tool however does have gps tagging. It was not an issue until my gps enabled camera died. Now I need to gps tag, because the camera I am now using does not have gps, and am just learning how to use darktable.
Makes sense. As you learn to use it you might find it simplifies your workflow to use Darktable for RAW conversion as well, since it will embed the geotags, resize the images if desired, apply cropping and image parameter edits all at once to the jpegs exported from darktable from the RAW files without you needing to separately make an intermediary jpeg.
I believe Darktable will also let you use text tags for file management and embed these to exported jpegs- which is a great tool- if I tag an image “Tsuga canadensis”, for example, when I upload the jpeg with that tag to iNaturalist it reads that tag and automatically selects “eastern hemlock” as its ID, without me having to type it into the upload box, wait for the auto-suggester dropdown, etc.
Thanks for mentioning Easy GPS Logger. I used it for the first time yesterday and it worked great… very easy to use and it didn’t drain the battery much at all. I’d also installed GPS Essentials, but found that one had too much going on for a total geotagging newbie to just fire it up and start using it right away.
I also installed GeoSetter on my computer to put the GPS data into the photo metadata after verifying the timestamps were in sync. That was a little less simple to just start using right away since that program has lots of options and isn’t as newbie friendly. I figured it out with some Googling though.
Once I uploaded the photos to iNat, I realized that the coordinates were correct, but that there wasn’t anything in the accuracy field. The file created by Easy GPS Loggerdoes have an accuracy value for each track point, and those values ranged from 3-14 meters for this trip. So I manually selected the photos in iNat and did a batch edit to set the accuracy for all the observations to 10m. I can’t find anything in GeoSetter that references accuracy values. Am I just missing it, or is it not there? Is there another simple free program that would work better?
It’s kind of neat to see my exact path on the map on iNat and when flipping through the pics in Picasa. Previously I had just manually selected a point on the map and dragged the accuracy circle out to approximately cover all the photos I had taken at that general location. Even with using the geotagging though I still went in and selected the photos from the trip and changed the locality name to the name of the preserve, town, state, country code. I think that’s more helpful than the broad place names that get auto-filled in from Google Maps.
