Of course the problem running a GPS tracking app is that it’s a drain on the phone’s battery. I compensate by carrying a spare battery (which I need anyway since I depend on my phone as a GPS map). Even so, using a spare battery in the field is annoying since it gets in the way of the observation process.
A simple workaround is to take multiple photos of every organism, even if only a single photo is needed for identification. When uploading photos to iNaturalist, avoid using the first photo taken as the first photo in the observation. On my iPhone 12 mini, this simple practice results in single-digit accuracy values in most cases.
what about geotagging a camera’s photos via an app? My canon DSLR died this weekend and I’m not sure another DSLR setup’s in the budget this year, but most of the point and shoot’s do not have a gps tracker at all. I’m curious if there’s apps that sync up to a point and shoot to geotag photos somehow.
yes this is very simple to do, see my first comment at the very top of this thread. You just have a geotagging app on your phone, make sure your camera’s time matches your phone’s time, and then have the geotagger running while you take photos. Once you get home, you can then match up the timestamps of the photos to the geotagging data created by the app to add coordinates. There are lots of different mobile apps that can do this
sure that can work (and it’s what I used to do in the past), but the two issues with this are
My phone GPS seems to be increasingly rubbish as I noted above
If I’m on a big field trip, I’ll take up to 2,500 photos in a single day, which then equate to somewhere between 200-400 observations. It’s very time-consuming/tedious to then have to match each of those up with the photo I took on my phone
It’s this app, “GPSLogger for Android”. I honestly can’t remember where I came across it, perhaps on the OpenStreetMap wiki. It’s free and open source, very lightweight and as far as I can tell doesn’t affect my battery life much. I installed the .apk file but it is on F-droid as well it seems.
It’s beyond simple to use, you just open the app and tap “Start logging”. You can specify logging intervals and so on if you want, I think I changed the frequency slightly. The tracks are saved to the device if you need them. I used to get a lot of photos that had wacky locations or no coordinates at all but running this has essentially eliminated these occurrences (in my experience!). I don’t think it records accuracy but I handle this when uploading.
I don’t care much about the accuracy of the GPS of the camera, I mostly want to know what trail I was on. More important is getting a fix in the first place, which can take minutes in heavily wooded areas. Also I love not having to enter a location manually, which saves time when uploading observations.
A lot of my observations are accurate to five meters, but I found one down to 50 meters. Oftentimes I don’t get a fix because I like to keep the camera off to preserve power and don’t wait long enough. In this case I use neighbouring observations in time to guesstimate the location.
One time I didn’t get a GPS fix in time and it was for an endangered lichen. I wasn’t able to give a precise enough location to a lichen expert that is responsible for monitoring lichens, he couldn’t find it. That one stung.
there was some data gathered many years back that went a little down the path of showing which cameras folks used for different taxa: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/good-cameras-for-nature-shots/1064/48. there’s mention in the thread about a tool at Flickr that might help do something similar, though i’ve never investigated it myself and am not sure if it still exists.
A lot of the time it can be the settings that are chosen by the user, rather than the actual capabilities of the phone, that affect results.
For instance when photographing a leaf it is importantly to know if it has hairs on it or not. But the use of a “beauty” filter tends to smooth out the evidence of hair. Having a phone that shoots in RAW format was a plus for me, which is why I buy the Pro versions of iPhone.
Location accuracy can also be set for geotagging photos, although it sounds like despite having settings correct some people still have problems with this, I know my old TomTom driving navigation device used to suffer from “satellite drift" and would result in the display showing me driving several meters off the road.
I just wanted to drop you a note of thanks. I wasn’t sure if I needed to start a trip or just opening it up would work so I experimented. Just opening it up didn’t help so I started recording a trip (or track or whatever it’s called) and, wow… that did it. I have consistently had problems in one particular place where one photo would record the actual place and the next two would jump to a spot about 500 feet away (a hotel near an urban NWR). With this app, every photo was bang on. I am so happy to have this! Thanks so much.
So does the GPS point from the app get added to the photo, or do you need to manually add it to each observation based on the track/timestamp you’re looking at?
It sounds compelling, I’ve had some issues with GPS inaccuracies as well on a mountainside in Carmel Valley and am hoping this might help solve this problem.
For me it is automatic, I think in general this is the default behaviour if your phone is already adding coordinates. Using the tracking app just seems to keep these coordinates more up to date. GPS accuracy in general is strongly affected by slope and topography so it’s not a panacea but it does seem to prevent some of the worst deviations I used to see.