Well…for what it’s worth…I can relate to much of your post (except the microscopy!) It’s even worse when you’re an enthusiastic nature generalist and you’re tempted to photo/ID everything from lichen to lizards to trees ;)
I agree with all the suggestions of the other posters. Back when I used a DSLR with onboard GPS, that definitely saved some time. Like you, my current DSLR lacks this, and pairing with the phone is a frustrating extra step. But I eventually ‘trained’ myself to make sure it was connected. Do whatever you have to do to “train” yourself to do likewise–even a temporary ‘sticky note’ reminder on the LCD screen can help! Make sure the camera is set (if you can) to show the ‘location’ icon so you can visually confirm that you’re logging location…then ‘train’ yourself to look for that icon every time your camera is on. Sometimes I’ll still forget to do this until after I’ve taken my shots (e.g. the bird has flown off, whatever). It’s not too late…connect up the camera and then just take a shot of your hand or whatever (I use my hand since it will stick out in the string of photos) so you get a shot with a location stamp. Then upload that shot along with your regular shots of the organism and ‘combine all’ to set the location…then obviously delete that ‘hand’ shot before your final upload/submission. Kinda clumsy but it does work, and saves a bit of time once you get used to it compared to manually chasing down the location :)
I need to make better use of the app/my smartphone rather than rely only on my DSLR. Case in point: I recently attended a ‘naturalist’ workshop where myself and other participants were, as you might expect, always taking pictures of the plants/critters we were encountering in our fieldwork. I used only my DSLR using basically the technique you’ve described. Another participant had a DSLR and used it for only some shots (= the ones you couldn’t really ‘get’ with a smartphone camera); for the rest she used the app and her phone camera. Bottom-line: she had most of her observations posted by the time the workshop was over; I’m still working through mine : / Now the quality of some of my photos is obviously much better, and for things like birds a phone just isn’t going to cut it. But for many other forms of life–particularly plants, insects, etc.–her photos are very good…in more than a few cases better than mine! And no issue with having to remember to link your DSLR and phone, etc. I’m not a big “app guy,” but I need to get over that and use the app and my phone more to help reduce my photo ‘backlog’ a bit :)