Unless it is a major landmark or attraction, it is often a little difficult to remember where exactly a photo is taken, especially if it’s been awhile since you took it or if you are a prolific photographer, snapping tens of thousands of frames while on vacation. This has given rise to geotagging; a new emerging process for embedding geographic locations into a picture’s EXIF (exchangable image file format) data. It has become an immensely popular practice, with more than a million photos geotagged on Flickr after the company introduced this feature about two years ago. However, the process hasn’t yet been as streamlined as one might hope.
Most geotagging on Flickr is done manually and there are few, if any, digital cameras with geotagging hardware built-in. Only recently (early August) did Nikon announce a line-up of GPS-enabled point-and-shoots and I’m certain that other manufactureres aren’t far behind to take advantage of the increase in Holiday Sales. But if you don’t want to buy a new camera just yet, you can pick up a standalone geotagging unit such as the GPS Picture Tracker from ATP.
What Do You Get?
Included inside the box is a brief instruction booklet and a carabiner. ATP says that ideally, you’d want to have as little interference as possible between the Photo Finder and the Geo-Positioning Satellites so it’s a good idea to clip the device using the carabiner to your pants or to the back of your backpack.
The carbiner is made of plastic and is quite flimsy. Since the GPS Picture Tracker doesn’t weigh very much, it shouldn’t be a problem, however, it’s rather disappointing to see that they didn’t spend the extra $50 cents to put in a cheap aluminum one that would match the obvious outdoor focus of this device.
The unit itself is a bit smaller than most cell phones, measuring (1.75″ x 3.25″). The ATP GPS Picture Tracker runs on a pair of AAA batteries, which will give you roughly 7 hours of battery life and are not included. You may want to run rechargeables so you can keep the cost of operation low.
Behind a rubber flap is the SD card slot and a mini-USB connector, which we’ll get into later. Powering the unit is the popular SiRFstarIII chipset and 123MB (according to the LCD screen) of flash memory which is used to log your position when the unit is in operation.
First Impressions
The selling point here is ease of use. Whereas some other devices on the market may require software, the Photo Finder only requires that you turn it on, leave it running and plug your SD card into the provided slot when you’re finished shooting. There are only three buttons so operation is simple. Turn it on and it will automatically start searching for your geographic position. Insert your SD card into the card slot and in a few seconds per picture, your JPEGs will have GPS info embedded in their EXIF data.
Unfortunately, the Photo Finder will only support JPEG, meaning that most professionals and advanced amateurs will not be able to use it with RAW files, such as Canon’s CR2 or Nikon’s NEF. Also, nearly all Canon (and most Nikon) DSLRs use compact flash, which the Photo Finder does not support. ATP does make compact flash compatible units geotagging units, but require you to dock it into a station tethered to your desktop. If you use a format other than SD and Sony Memory Stick, you can plug a card reader into the mini-USB slot, making it a little more versatile.
Build quality is quite good and the Photo Finder feels quite solid. The battery door secures tightly and the unit could probably survive falling out of your pocket. However, despite what the rubberized exterior suggests, it is not water resistant so don’t leave it hanging on your bag out in the rain.
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Usage and Findings
Despite the leaps that GPS has taken in recent years, most units still require a few minutes to acquire and lock a satellite signal. The Photo Finder is no different. It takes roughly ten minutes for it to find satellites in wide open spaces with cloudless skies.
I found that the ATP GPS Picture Tracker struggled to get a lock if there were clouds or tall buildings around. The LCD may indicate that it has a signal briefly but for the most part, it does not work at all in major urban areas. I took the Photo Finder on my trip to Tokyo and it did not work at all in the city. The only time it did work was when I was at the beach or in areas outside the bustling metropolis. If you happen to be on a beach or perhaps Edmonton, like Michael Kwan, then this would be perfect for you. None of that wheat and wind is going to get in the way of your geotagging fun!
When it does get a lock, the Photo Finder will tell you on the LCD your exact GPS coordinates and record your position every few seconds to the onboard memory.
Testing
In order to test the Photo Finder, I took a walk outside and randomly shot eight photos with my Canon PowerShot SD800IS. Inserting the SD card into the slot on the side of the Photo Finder automatically brings up a prompt on the LCD that asks you if you’d like to tag all the photos on the card. When you select yes, it’ll go through all the photos on the card, taking about 3 seconds, tagging the ones that it has data logged for. After that’s done, you can also write a KMZ file for use with Google Earth.
While the Photo Finder declared that it had successfully tagged all eight pictures, plugging the card into my laptop revealed that none of the pictures were functional and were now corrupt (although they do appear to have a small thumbnail sized remnant of the actual image) 16KB data files that could not be opened. This was quite troubling as the operation of the Photo Finder is a single button press and I can’t see where it could’ve gone wrong.
My second attempt was the same with eight random pictures taken after the Photo Finder had acquired a signal. This time, I backed up all the photos first before plugging it in to the device. ATP does recommend that you backup your card before tagging, but imagine a users horror to find that their whole 16GB’s of vacation pictures were wiped out?
The second attempt yielded a single image with proper geotag data while the other seven remained unreadable 16KB files. As a reference, the 7.1MP images taken by the SD800IS should be roughly 3MB each. Perhaps the most confusing is that putting the original images back onto the card and plugging it into the Photo Finder again resulted in two images that were properly geotagged…although they were different ones than the first.
This means that success with the Photo Finder could be as random as a slot machine. This does not bode well as trying to geotag all your vacation photos could result in an entire trip’s worth of photos eaten by the Photo Finder! Again, ATP themselves tell you to back up all your pictures prior to ensure this doesn’t happen but seriously, it shouldn’t in the first place!
I tried this several more times to varying degrees of success but the Photo Finder never properly tagged more than 1/3 of the photos on the card.
If you manage to get the Photo Finder to properly tag a photo, the GPS data appears like this in the EXIF. While some of the images that were tagged properly were done so with near pinpoint accuracy, I found that several were off by perhaps a 100 meters or so. Not a huge deal since you really only need a general idea of where the picture was taken and 100 meters isn’t a big deal.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
With such glaring flaws, it’s difficult to recommend the Photo Finder to anyone. It’s really quite disappointing considering the quality of previous ATP products that we’ve reviewed. This product is a great idea and I think more products like this will be quite plentiful in the very near future, allowing folks with older cameras to get into the geotagging fun. With the ATP GPS Picture Tracker only making about a $99.00 dent in your wallet, it’s no wonder camera companies are rushing to include this technology in their products.
The ATP GPS Picture Tracker needs some serious polish in order for it to be a usable product and it’s simply inexcusable to have such problems in this day and age. The destruction of photos on whole memory cards will only lead to brand anguish from customers that lost all their travel photos to it. However, given the quality of ATP’s other products, I can’t see them not doing someting about it. Hopefully they will also consider supporting RAW formats to appease the enthusiasts. Until then, wait for something better to become available before jumping into the geotagging pool as this product clearly isn’t ready for prime time.
Pros
- Cheap
- Easy to use
- Compact size
- Build quality is rather solid
Cons
- Doesn’t work most of the time
- When it doesn’t work, it will kill your pictures
- Doesn’t work with RAW image formats
- Requires vast open spaces and near zero cloud cover to acquire satellite signal
- Battery life could be better
Overall Rating: 4.5 /10.0
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