souporman
23rd of February 2009 (Mon), 06:27
I went out yesterday to play with my new JOBO photoGPS (http://www.jobo.com/web/photoGPS.447.0.html) so thought I'd give a little feedback on it. Note that I've only had it for a couple of days and only had one outing with it so these are very early thoughts.
Pros
- It's dead simple to use. Just slide it into your hotshoe and fire away. It seems to keep up with a moderate speed of firing as well. I was shooting some HDR stuff with 7 shots in a row and everything was tagged correctly. Not that it matters I suppose, if it misses a few frames in a burst it's not like you've moved at all so the location would be the same.
- Battery life is almost excessive. It's only "on" when you take a photo, so I imagine it will only need to be charged a couple of times while I'm away for a month. It charges through a USB port, but my blackberry charger works fine on it as well which is good.
- The software does some cool reverse lookup stuff so you not only get the GPS coordinates but you also get City & Street details. It seems to stuff these into the keyword fields in lightroom, not sure if they make it anywhere into exifs however.
- You can dump the locations into a folder via the software in case you just need to empty the unit and aren't ready to synch with the images yet.
- The unit has a little button on the side that you can use to force a GPS reading. It's useful for when you're about to go into a building as you can press it before or after and then just synch that address to all of the shots you take indoors.
- The locations it provides are pretty accurate. One of the locations has me standing about 10 meters out into the Thames, but the rest of them were pretty spot on. I should note that it's not exactly consistent though. I took a set of 7 consecutive shots for an HDR (on a tripod) and while 6 of them were pretty much bang on, one of them was the one that had me out in the river). I think more testing with different weather conditions is probably needed...it was really overcast yesterday evening and I don't know if that affects things.
Cons
- It has a very small amount of internal memory. Empty, it claims to have room for ~1024 locations. This is totally fine if you're just bumming around for a day as I rarely take that many shots on a single outing. It's not so great for extended holidays where you have no access to a computer to dump the locations.
- Very minor (and expected), but it adds a step in my workflow. I need to import my images from the card into a folder using the photoGPS software and synch the locations with the photos, then import from the folder into lightroom.
- It relies on a tiny, weak spring to stay in your hotshoe. This thing is going to fall out and hit the floor at some point during our life together. I only hope that when it happens that a) I'll notice it's fallen out and b) that it doesn't shatter. I don't know why they didn't include a tension screw or something like they have on flash units.
- It does take up your hotshoe. It's not a huge deal for me as I don't use my flash a lot, but it is sort of a pain for me to have to swap it out for my hotshoe level (which I do use quite a bit). The upside to this is that I'm always removing the photogps between shots and putting it in my pocket, thereby lessening the chance of it jumping out of the hotshoe and committing suicide.
- When it doesn't work, it indicates that it does. When you take a photo or use the button on the side a green light flashes to indicate that it's made a location entry. What it doesn't indicate is that if it's failed, the entry it has made is empty (though seems to take up one of your precious memory slots). To be fair, the only failures it's had on me so far has been when I tried testing it inside.
- I shoot raw, so it creates an XMP sidecar file for each image. This is fine as I import everything into lightroom and it takes those files and writes it into it's own little database (or presumably into lightrooms own xmp sidecar file if you have that option checked). The issue I've had with this so far is that it overwrites some of the exif details that are captured better by the camera itself. For example, my 24mm TS-E lens is simply recorded as 24mm. All I want this thing to record is the GPS location...if it just did that then there wouldn't be any overwriting issues, and I would assume there would be more room for more locations as well. Fortunately, it's all xml so I plan on writing a script or something that will remove all of the extra bits before importing them into lightroom which I assume will pick up anything missing from the raw files exif (will have to test this).
- I can't plug it into a machine and access it like an external drive. I should clarify that I've only plugged this into one machine so far, but I didn't get the usual "USB device" notifications that I was expecting. What this means for me is that I'll need to haul a netbook or something around on extended holidays just to empty the locations when it fills up. I was hoping to be able to plug it into a portable hard drive and dump the locations onto it as I do my photos. So far, I've only been able to access the device via the included software but I'm hoping that I'll be able to figure something else out.
Hope that's helpful for some people looking for a geotagging option. Overall I like it, but it does have some annoying limitations. I think some minor tweaks to the physical design and an update to the software interaction side of things and it will be close to perfect (for my needs). What I really wish for is something that records the gps location directly into the exif when I press the shutter, but I think I have to wait a while for that (or switch to nikon ;))
I'll post a photo or two this evening with the gps details, right now the only ones I have online are the finished hdr images and photomatix seems to strip those details out (or they get lost somewhere along the way).
Pros
- It's dead simple to use. Just slide it into your hotshoe and fire away. It seems to keep up with a moderate speed of firing as well. I was shooting some HDR stuff with 7 shots in a row and everything was tagged correctly. Not that it matters I suppose, if it misses a few frames in a burst it's not like you've moved at all so the location would be the same.
- Battery life is almost excessive. It's only "on" when you take a photo, so I imagine it will only need to be charged a couple of times while I'm away for a month. It charges through a USB port, but my blackberry charger works fine on it as well which is good.
- The software does some cool reverse lookup stuff so you not only get the GPS coordinates but you also get City & Street details. It seems to stuff these into the keyword fields in lightroom, not sure if they make it anywhere into exifs however.
- You can dump the locations into a folder via the software in case you just need to empty the unit and aren't ready to synch with the images yet.
- The unit has a little button on the side that you can use to force a GPS reading. It's useful for when you're about to go into a building as you can press it before or after and then just synch that address to all of the shots you take indoors.
- The locations it provides are pretty accurate. One of the locations has me standing about 10 meters out into the Thames, but the rest of them were pretty spot on. I should note that it's not exactly consistent though. I took a set of 7 consecutive shots for an HDR (on a tripod) and while 6 of them were pretty much bang on, one of them was the one that had me out in the river). I think more testing with different weather conditions is probably needed...it was really overcast yesterday evening and I don't know if that affects things.
Cons
- It has a very small amount of internal memory. Empty, it claims to have room for ~1024 locations. This is totally fine if you're just bumming around for a day as I rarely take that many shots on a single outing. It's not so great for extended holidays where you have no access to a computer to dump the locations.
- Very minor (and expected), but it adds a step in my workflow. I need to import my images from the card into a folder using the photoGPS software and synch the locations with the photos, then import from the folder into lightroom.
- It relies on a tiny, weak spring to stay in your hotshoe. This thing is going to fall out and hit the floor at some point during our life together. I only hope that when it happens that a) I'll notice it's fallen out and b) that it doesn't shatter. I don't know why they didn't include a tension screw or something like they have on flash units.
- It does take up your hotshoe. It's not a huge deal for me as I don't use my flash a lot, but it is sort of a pain for me to have to swap it out for my hotshoe level (which I do use quite a bit). The upside to this is that I'm always removing the photogps between shots and putting it in my pocket, thereby lessening the chance of it jumping out of the hotshoe and committing suicide.
- When it doesn't work, it indicates that it does. When you take a photo or use the button on the side a green light flashes to indicate that it's made a location entry. What it doesn't indicate is that if it's failed, the entry it has made is empty (though seems to take up one of your precious memory slots). To be fair, the only failures it's had on me so far has been when I tried testing it inside.
- I shoot raw, so it creates an XMP sidecar file for each image. This is fine as I import everything into lightroom and it takes those files and writes it into it's own little database (or presumably into lightrooms own xmp sidecar file if you have that option checked). The issue I've had with this so far is that it overwrites some of the exif details that are captured better by the camera itself. For example, my 24mm TS-E lens is simply recorded as 24mm. All I want this thing to record is the GPS location...if it just did that then there wouldn't be any overwriting issues, and I would assume there would be more room for more locations as well. Fortunately, it's all xml so I plan on writing a script or something that will remove all of the extra bits before importing them into lightroom which I assume will pick up anything missing from the raw files exif (will have to test this).
- I can't plug it into a machine and access it like an external drive. I should clarify that I've only plugged this into one machine so far, but I didn't get the usual "USB device" notifications that I was expecting. What this means for me is that I'll need to haul a netbook or something around on extended holidays just to empty the locations when it fills up. I was hoping to be able to plug it into a portable hard drive and dump the locations onto it as I do my photos. So far, I've only been able to access the device via the included software but I'm hoping that I'll be able to figure something else out.
Hope that's helpful for some people looking for a geotagging option. Overall I like it, but it does have some annoying limitations. I think some minor tweaks to the physical design and an update to the software interaction side of things and it will be close to perfect (for my needs). What I really wish for is something that records the gps location directly into the exif when I press the shutter, but I think I have to wait a while for that (or switch to nikon ;))
I'll post a photo or two this evening with the gps details, right now the only ones I have online are the finished hdr images and photomatix seems to strip those details out (or they get lost somewhere along the way).