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WMU Geotagging

geotagging phone automatic

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#1
jjlad

jjlad

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Hi there, this is my first post so hope I've selected the correct forum.

 

I'm doing more travelling now and wish to geotag images taken with my Nikon cameras. I use the D7200 mostly, and don't really like the idea of using an accessory GPS device.

 

What I'm thinking is that if I turn WMU on, the camera is then tethered to the phone. WMU gives the option to take photos or download photos to the phone. My understanding is that as you download them to the phone the GPS coordinates get stored with them.

 

Problem 1 with that is at that point one may be nowhere near where the photo was taken and the tag will be inaccurate

I was thinking perhaps there's an option in WMU to have every photo taken, download to the phone as one takes them, but I really don't want them ALL on the phone so that doesn't work. 

 

Then I thought ...OK, there is already a connection between the phone and the camera via WMU. Does it not follow then, that the camera should be able to pick up the geotag information from the phone automatically ....no cords, no hassle? The connection is there if WMU is turned on.

 

Can't Nikon engineer WMU to allow that to happen? I honestly don't understand why Nikon wouldn't have built that functionality into WMU initially give they have so few cameras with GPS and the rest of the industry is including that in a hurry. Sure ...it would cripple sales of their add on GPS but it is so expensive most people use 3rd party substitutes anyway, so they probably wouldn't lose much and the goodwill they would earn would be priceless.

 

I've used Jeffrey Friedl's Lightroom plug in and obtained my GPS data from Google. That works but is time consuming and not very accurate if you are travelling. I've also taken an image with the phone at each location then in the map module ...dragged all the images I knew were shot there, onto that map point.

 

The various alternatives all work with some effort but It would be far better to get the info into the image file as it is taken, and it just seems to me that the pipeline for it exists with WMU and there just needs to be a way to exploit it.

 

Any member thoughts on this would be appreciated.

 

Thanks! 



#2
ScottinPollock

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Having wireless on full time while shooting is going to kill your battery, even if what you wish for would be doable. More modern cameras use BTLE to do this which uses much less power than wifi.
 
I think the best method here would be to use one of a number of apps (possibly even your LR plugin) out there that will apply coordinates from a GPX/NMEA tracklog to a batch of images' EXIF metadata based on a UTC offset (or just set your camera's time zone to UTC). Then just get an app for your phone that will record the tracklog at appropriate intervals (GPS Essentials is one if you're on Android).


#3
jjlad

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Thanks Scottin, Ok. I see what you mean regarding battery drain with wi-fi on all the time. Too bad. I recently downloaded all my google location history and am updating thousands of photos from that using the LR plugin. That's a relatively slow process as for each batch one has to wait while the history file is analyzed and that only gives a location you were at 'around' the time the photo was taken. You can set the UTC in program to match the time at the location ...and then process all the images in that time zone.

Going forward I'll just take a smartphone photo at each location and sync all the others shot there to that.

Thanks for your advice!







Also tagged with one or more of these keywords: geotagging, phone, automatic