In my last post I talked about the GPS tracker I bought recently. By now I have had the chance to take it out on three trips 😀 So I have definitely had time to test it.
The device takes three AAA batteries for tagging your location for 15 hours, so it is best to buy some rechargable batteries for it. After you put the batteries in, you just need to push the button to power it on and you are ready to go! So very easy. The only downside: the device takes several minutes to find your location initially, so if you want to tag all photos, be sure to turn it on a few minutes in advance.
The AMOD came with a little band so you can clip the tracker to your belt or to a bag. I clipped it onto a belt loop when i went out. It’s neither heavy nor big enough to get in the way, which is a plus.
Once you have turned it on, you can basically forget about it. It has three lights on the front to show you that it is turned on and working and also to let you know if the signal is not strong enough (which can happen inside) or the memory of the AMOD is full. It has 128MB memory, which does not sound like much but is enough for 72 hours of tracking data! You can increase that timeframe by letting it only record your location every 5 or 10 seconds instead of every second.
it gets a bit more complicated once you are back home from your photo trip: the AMOD comes with a software you can use to embed the GPS data into your images but I haven’t tried that software yet. What I have been doing is the following: I import my photos into Aperture like normal and then use Ovolab Geophoto to match the photos to the GPS track, which is pretty easy. The AMOD records the time on GMT, so you just need to tell it the time zone your camera uses and any time your photo is off from the „official“ time (mine is off by 29 seconds). Then I just need to hit a button to embed the longitude and latitude in the EXIF of my RAW file and simply update the EXIF in Aperture. And voilá, my photos have GPS locations 😀
I only checked the locations on a few photos from my first try and they were off by a few meters but that could be due to the device not being calibrated (which also just takes the push of a button) or my reading the time difference from my camera wrong.
Overall, I really, really like the device and how relatively easy it is to embed the data. Of course, it adds some extra steps to my workflow but the way I have set it up currently, I could add the locations any time after importing, it is not the first thing I have to do and I can go back and add locations for edited versions of photos (e.g., HDRs or Panoramas). Definitely a great option till I get a camera and/or memory card with a GPS chip embedded.
