I will look at the Easytagger if they ever come out for my Canon SLR. For my upcoming Europe trip, I decided to travel lite. I am leaving all the SLR stuff at home. I purchased a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7, which has a built in tagger, a 25-300mm Leica lens and shoots high def video. Combined weights, less than eight ounces and fits in my pocket.

Canon DSLRs do not have the interface to connect to these devices. Nikon screen also displays the GPS data before and after you take a picture and record the GPS.

Also has a little GPS icon indicating if you got a satellite fix or not.

So you will likely have to get a separate device which records your position every 5 seconds. Then you can sync this log of GPS coordinates to the time stamp of the pictures to interpolate your position.

There are a number of devices under $100 which will do that. Easytagger also logs too but it's double the price of the simple loggers.

To log the footprints seems to be their another highlight features, how does that perform?

You slide the switch all the way to the right. Then it will record your positions every 5 seconds to a log file on the micro SD card.

Then you take the SD card out, put it in an adaptor (they sent me one with my package) and then you have to get software to convert that log file into a form you can use.

http://www.easytagger.ca/downloads.php

I use GPS Babel to convert from NEMA to KML or Google Earth format. Then when you open the kml file, it will open it in Google Earth (which you can download for free) and it will show your tracks. You can save it in My Places in Google Earth so you can see it later.

Just don't take a photo in front of your house and then post it on the internet... at least not with a caption "and this is my house!"

I find it easier to just take a photo of the name of the town we're coming into so I know where the pictures are taken; also my camera has a date stamp which when downloaded to my computer tells me when the picture was taken. But having the name of the town on the photo says it all.
Som

Well this shows more than a sign:

http://www.panoramio.com/map/#lt=48....&k=2&a=1&tab=1

bookmarking. thanks.

Luisalex on Aug 28, 10 at 05:57 AM
To log the footprints seems to be their another highlight features, how does that perform?


Yes, it is called route tracking function. It works like this: when you are hiking with camera and GPS on, take Easytag as example, easytagger records the geo info every 5S and log the file in its insert SD card. Then you take out the SD card, and put it in an adaptor to convert that log file into a form you can use by a software, then you can see your footprint in the hiking.

As I understand, gps is a way to memorise the photo by location, while the normal way is by time.

I just do some surfing and found some of Canon do support gps, such as Canon 40/50D, 7D, 5D and 5D mark 2, but that need an very expensive device to connect with it.

I visited easytag website www.e-geotag.com now they do not offer any gift now, they just lowered their price to $120. That price is acceptable for me. And seems they will release a new bluetooth product. I also emailed them and got their reply that Canon gps will be their next product.

The bluetooth would be a nice feature. You don't have to have the device on the camera then, tethered by a cord. You just have to have it in a pocket or maybe the camera bag.

That's a good price reduction. I like the Easytagger but find a couple of faults:

1. It drains the battery of the camera. It's suppose to go 10 hours on its own battery (which takes a long time to charge too BTW) and then draw battery from the camera thereafter.

I tend to leave it and the camera on because it takes a long time to acquire enough satellites for a good lock. Turning it off and turning it back on would also cause that delay.

Recent trip to NY, which is a very tough environment for GPS, is that in the mornings, I would turn the Easytagger and camera on at the hotel and then walk a bit and take the subway downtown. Well after I got out of the subway, it would still take 30-60 minutes to get a good lock. My iPhone using assisted GPS (using the cell tower location along with GPS) got a lock right away.

So leaving it on all day, by late afternoon or early evening, both the Easytagger and the DSLR battery would be dead. I can swap out the DSLR battery but not for the Easytagger.

It would probably be better not to have the tagger drain from the DSLR. So there is probably a bluetooth receiver that you connect to the DSLR and hopefully that won't drain the DSLR battery much because the GPS chip is in a separate unit and that's what really eats up the battery.

2. Easytagger gives altimeter readings with a barometric altimeter. That thing is totally unreliable, often giving me -10m readings, depending on the weather. It's good about relative values so if it's -10m at ground level, then when I go up a building, it will register a higher reading.

I'm not sure the directional compass is that accurate or consistent either.

But that's okay, there really aren't that many programs which render the altitude (it stores the data but doesn't depict the altitude) or direction. Google Earth will have little arrows pointing to the direction though and that's about it.

Thanks for the information.

How about turn off the camera and leave the Easytagger on? Would that work?

30-60 minutes? As I understand, that would only cost around 40 seconds. Who can wait for a 60 minutes for a gps lock?

As I understand, barometric altimeter will vary according to the changes of the weather. I got a handheld one, and sometimes I will get -20m. It is just accurate in caculating the height. So now I need a gps altitude.

I'll try that but I figured camera goes into sleep mode anyways. If the Easytagger has no juice left, you'd lose the lock anyways.

Manhattan is tough on GPS. I remember a previous trip with a Garmin Nuvi I used to have and I could never get a lock, either at Times Square or up high in the hotel room, with the window open and the GPS held outside the window. Probably didn't have a view of the southern sky.

Easytagger will tell you GPS altitude is better. Actually, if I cared enough about altitude, I can get it via Google Earth and a GPS program. It locates the GPS coordinates and then finds the known altitude at that position and can write that altitude data in.

But that would defeat the purpose of the direct EXIF write at capture purpose of the product.

The pictures I took while I didn't have the lock, I used GE to locate and set the GPS coordinates via HoudahGeo, a Mac-only program for geocoding.