luzUNLIMITED – Photography by Scott Viney

I heard about GPS4CAM from a Matt Brandon video blog post awhile ago. Its an app for your Apple device and also a small desktop program when used in combination will geotag your photos with the locations you shot them or close enough to it. So, when you leave on a photo shoot outing you set the app running. It records a location at set time intervals depending on how accurate you want. Every 5 minutes works well if you’re walking around. If you shake it you can even record a location as you want. When you get home from your photo outing you export a QR code, which you also take a photo of. Then what I have been doing is I copy all the photos into a folder on my desktop. Open up the desktop software that comes with the app and it will read the QR code and then add some metadata to the photo for the location you were at. I believe it matches the time stamp from closest location recorded by app to the time stamp of your photo. Once that is completed I then follow my usual routine of importing the geo-tagged photos into Adobe Lightroom and there you should notice that there is some new metadata that will pin point your location in Google maps. Whoa! Sounds like a lot of work. But not really.

In essence thats how it works but there are some things to be aware of. I thought at the time, when I saw that video blog, awesome. This little Apple Ipod Touch thingy that we had recently bought could be put to great use in geotagging my photos. Ill just download the app and put the Ipod in my pocket and away we go. When you read the information about it on the Itunes site it tells you it will work with and Ipod Touch. But in reality it does and it doesnt. How do I know. I learnt the hard way. I went on a little trip….ahhh about 30kms down the road to take some photos and to try this sucker. Went through all the details of adding the geo tags to my photos an importing them into Lightroom only to find out they were all tagged with the location of my house. So when I say it does and doesnt I found out through the author that it does as long as your Ipod Touch has a WiFi signal the whole time. You see the Ipod Touch doesnt have the GPS chip that the mobile versions have. That is the Iphone or Ipad with 3G. Now you can remedy this by purchasing a $100 additional device that you connect via Bluetooth to your Ipod Touch. But this is a little excessive considering the amount already paid for the Ipod Touch.

Luckily I was given an Ipad 2 with 3G as a gift a month or two after this first run with the app. Which I was looking forward to now finally testing to see if it worked. So with my partners family here from overseas we headed to Sydney for several days for some sightseeing. As an Apple technology newbie and trying not to bring our plane down. I followed the rules and put the Ipad into airplane mode. When we arrived in Sydney at our hotel I started up the app and set it recording our location every 5 minutes. So after running the app for four days I went through the routine of geotagging my photos and importing them into Lightroom. Only this time I kept getting a message that there were 39 photos it couldn’t geotag. So I did it again. Same thing. So sitting there in front of Lightroom I was trying to figure out why the first days photos weren’t tagged yet every other day was fine. Then it came to me. On the second day I was trying to use the internet but couldnt get a wifi signal because the airplane mode was still activated. So make sure that you re-activate it once you have arrived at your destination. It would be really great if the author of the app could program in a pop up box that mentions the device is still in airplane mode when you start it.

Other than these couple of gotcha’s this app works great. And now with new map module in Lightroom 4 its even better as all this information is right there in front of you. Hopefully this information helps you with choosing whether on not to get GPS4CAM. If not maybe Apple could sort out the store so you can try apps for a time before buying.

And here are a couple of images from there that have been geo-tagged. If you click on the image it should take you to the location of where they were shot.