Hello, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to add location data to iNaturalist photos I took with a regular Canon Zoom camera that generally doesn’t have geotagging ability. ** Too bad I can’t auto apply the GPS from one photo in an observation to all the other photos??? ***
To get around this, I take photos with my iPhone and then try to copy/paste that lat and long into my iNaturalist observation but I can only do this on Mac desktop when I get home form vacation. The only way I know to get my iPhone’s pic coordinates is to use my iMac’s Preview app and copy/paste the lat and long fields individually. However, iNat won’t accept Apple’s Preview app’s default DMS “Degrees, Minute, Seconds” coordinates.
My other option is to guesstimate my location using Google Maps but GM now defaults to DMS instead of the MUCH easier and universal decimal degrees.
I also use a free app I love called “My GPS Location” which texts me my location coordinates in decimal degrees including a link which works with Google Maps, but why force THREE steps when ONE should work???
And ultimately, all of this gets MUCH more difficult when I’m in the field with Seek and my cell signal is weak or non existent.
One workaround that I frequently use for situations like this is that I take a photo of the back of my camera using my phone. The is usually good enough of an image for other users or CV to get a close identification, plus it automatically uploads the coordinates. Then, I can upload the better photos to the observation later.
This is still a few steps, but it has worked fine for me on a small scale.
One thing I used for many years of field work with a non-gps camera was to record a gps track, either with a standalone gps logger or my phone, then use Picmeta Phototracker to transfer the coordinates from the track to the photos. It does this using the photo time, so your camera’s clock needs to be accurate.
I don’t have an iphone so I can’t give specific instructions but it looks like there are EXIF viewer apps that can see the gps coordinates, and you can change the format to decimal degrees.
If your iPhone photos already have lat-long embedded, I suggest creating/initiating each observation using a single iPhone photo, either through the iPhone iNaturalist app, or later from your desktop. Then add your Canon photos to the observation, which will already have the coordinates established from the initial iPhone photo. You can choose to delay uploading your iPhone observations until you are home and have your Canon photos ready to add immediately after. You can even delete the iPhone photo (if you don’t like it) after adding the other Canon photos to the observation - the observation coordinates won’t change.
In these situations I recommend working in Airplane Mode so that your location services are coming purely from GPS satellite fixes.
You can do this by pinning a location in the website interface, and applying that location to all of the observations being uploaded. Make sure the circle of accuracy is large enough to encompass where all of the observations were made.
However @jdmore’s suggestion is better, and will give more precise results.
I don’t use Apple products - I use a Windows-11 desktop computer and a Samsung Android phone. However, I DO use the phone to generate a .GPX file to apply to photos taken on my Canon camera before uploading them to iNat.
The App I use on the phone to collect the GPX data is called GeoTracker and is started just before I go out to collect observations. When I get home I use this App to email the generated GPX file to myself. I then open the email on my desktop and save the GPX file to my hard-drive. All of my photos from the trip are also downloaded to the hard-drive and put into the same folder as the GPX file. I then us ea program on my desktop called Mappero GeoTagger which loads the GPX file AND all of the photos and then applies the location details (based on time) to each of teh photos. I can then upload the photos, with location data, to iNaturalist.
Your phone used as GPS receiver, connected to your Canon camera (via an app), providing it with geolocation info every time you take a photo
Your phone used as GPS receiver, to record its location to a file on a set interval; then later use this file to automatically add location info to your photos
Option 1 is quite straightforward (if allowed by both devices - just configure them to connect and share location info), but your iPhone and Canon have to stay connected (BT, WiFi…) constantly while you shoot, which uses extra power.
Option 2 uses less power but requires extra steps, first to ensure that phone and camera clocks are perfectly in sync, then to reconcile geolocation file and photos at a later time, using special software e.g. Lightroom, Geosetter