Geotagging Photos

Tutorials
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Thanks @ken_ohio, this is a useful workaround. I invariably have my smart phone with me while I’m iNatting so a quick recording of the coordinates of a location and save to Notes works pretty well. I’d just have the two apps open while in the field. (I’ll have to practice this a little since I have clumsy fingers when using my phone.)

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85

I’ve been using Geotag Photos Pro App and Desktop Application with my IPhone for two years now. I believe it cost about 19$ but it would have been $150 to get the GPS atachment for my camera if they still made them. It works pretty well when doing bird photography with my Nikon D90 and Telephoto or Macro, Though I typically use the INat App for most other things.

It is easier on phone battery life than most of my other apps that track locations while I’m being an nature junkie.

Now if sound recordings worked like this. The App Song Sleuth For Bird and Amphibian recordings will show you a map of song recordings and attempt to help id the sounds.

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86

CP Pro and Camera Plus bundle has a macro feature which helps with giving you better clarity for close in shots. I’m running it on an Iphone SE (5) Its not as good as an SLR with dedicated Macro lens but it helps a great deal. I believe it only cost 1-2$ for both.

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88

Ok, ty!

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What I do is take a photo with my phone at the spot where I’m taking a photo with our Canon. I then use the time stamps to pair up the photos from both devices. I drag the phone’s photo into iNat and let it read the geotag, then remove that photo from the upload entry and drag in the Canon photos I want to use. Would that work for you? It would save messing with a keyboard. If you take a LOT of photos with your camera, I suppose this tactic would get cumbersome. We can take as photos (on the Canon) of as many as 30 organisms but not many more than that at any one trip.

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I think this might be a useful technique but I’m not clear about the sequence of actions here. I work on a desktop computer. What do you mean by “drag the phone’s photo into iNat”? Do you mean that you’ve downloaded your phone photos onto a desktop/laptop, you have the iNat website open, and you’re dragging images onto the Upload page here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload
???
I can see how that would “let [iNat] read the geotag”, then add other photos (from the Canon) and combine them with the geotagged phone image.

I work on a desktop computer through the photo storage of iPhoto (an old version), so by implication, I’ll have to make sure my phone pics (Photo Stream on my iPhone) are already read into the desktop computer.

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Yes. I work on desktop and have both my phone and Canon photos on my desktop. (sorry for not being a bit vague with my comments and assumptions that you, too, worked on desktop)

You have to upload (drag in my case) the phone’s photo first but you can remove that photo while leaving the observation intact and still maintaining the location. Then you can add any other photo(s) that you want. Many of my ‘geotag’ photos are useless as an image. If my husband is using the Canon, my photo is often of him taking the photo to help a little in matching up the two camera photos. Or it might be just a quick wide shot of something he’s photographing a ways away.

I have learned to either keep the camera app open while we hike/travel or, if it’s newly opened, to wait a minute for the geolocation feature to kick in. It doesn’t work if I open the app and immediately shoot a photo.

I have a whole procedure I use to keep things sorted after a nature hike/trip but I suspect you’d have your own system and you could just add this trick to whatever that is.

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I was looking for a replacement for GeoSetter because it’s slow and a bit buggy (if you open up another program like Google Earth or Excel it wipes out your unsaved tags; took me a while to figure out what was causing that), but haven’t been able to find one. I have a huge library of GPS points that I keep in a spreadsheet and often go back to the same places, and GeoSetter seems to be the only one that allows you to directly edit the coordinates rather than syncing to a track.

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I’ve just discovered that I can use Garmin Basecamp to use the tracks from my eTrex20x gps unit to geotag my photos taken with my old DLSRs (Canon EOS 50D and 20D). This is going to save me so much time, and is way more accurate than the location data on my phone photos :)

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94

Just remember that the timestamp on the photo is used to determine the location. So the accuracy depends on your camera time being set correct. My Canon 60D tends to get slightly ahead over time, so I try to remember to check it before I head out for the day. I usually have to back it off a little bit to the correct time.

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Also, it is the location of your CAMERA, not neccesarily what you are photographing! Trees and birds can easily be 20-50m away from where you take the photo, depending on your zoom capabilities.

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97

That’s great, I’ve always wondered about best free options to recommend to people who don’t have Lightroom. If it’s something they already have on their computer, even better. Looks like some of the other ones mentioned above are:

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98

Very true - though most of what I photograph is macro so usually won’t be an issue. Can always expand the accuracy circle, or just edit the location for the farther ones. But at least having a starting point to edit from is super helpful - sometimes after wandering around for a couple hours it’s difficult to pinpoint where you were. This has often resulted in batch uploads with the whole property in the accuracy circle, rather than specific location per observation. Glad to be able to improve my data accuracy

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Indeed it does. I did reset the time on my camera before starting out. But for reference to anyone interested, Garmin Basecamp allows you to set a time difference when uploading. So if you forgot to change your camera time for daylight savings, or a time zone shift, or just know your camera clock is 6min off true time, you can tell it to correct for that.

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100

I use exiftool, but I agree it’s not a good option for most people, unless they’re comfortable using the command-line.

One thing to note is that GPS tracks don’t contain accuracy information. When I geotag my photos, I also try to add a reasonable accuracy value (GPSHPositioningError). I’m not sure which of those other programs allow you to set the accuracy, but it’s something to consider.

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101

When you upload the photos into the iNat uploader after geotagging them, you can select them all and set the “accuracy” for all of them at once in the location settings.

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102

One trick to handle the camera time issue: Take a photo of your laptop screen or mobile, while it shows https://time.is/. After that it is relatively easy to correct photo times using Exiftool as I do, or to input the difference to program that has the option … which reminds me to check Geotagging in BaseCamp.

So far I’ve use Java program GeoTag. That allows tuning the locations in Google Map. I know - in general Java is a bad idea nowadays.

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103

I can’t figure out how to export photos from Cyclemeter onto my computer. Can you help?

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Inside the Cyclemeter app, you can export individual tracks by going to the History tab, selecting a track, and then using Share. Share has several options. I use the GPX File option and then save to my Dropbox.

If you’ve got lots of tracks, then doing them one-by-one is a bit of a pain. In that case, I download the whole Cyclemeter database (Meter.db) to my computer. I do that using the PhoneView app, which I like as a convenient way to get files on and off my iPhone. iTunes, or now the Finder in MacOS Big Sur, can also do this.

If you’re familiar with R, I have an R script (https://github.com/mjon/Cyclemeter-R-GPX-exporter) that exports individual GPX files from all of the tracks in Meter.db.

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I currently have two cameras, a Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ80 and an Olympus TG-6. The Olympus has built-in GPS, although it sometimes takes a while to connect, so not all of the photos actually have embedded location data. The Panasonic does not, or if it does I haven’t found the setting yet. I always check the location on the web uploader, because I’ve noticed that even the geotagged photos are not completely accurate.

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