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Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same i
by thedance 7y ago
Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.
- outworlder 7y agoEXIF tagging.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y agoBecause you would want your photos to be geotagged. Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.
- zchrykng 7y agoGPS in the camera is handy for auto-tagging the location of the photos. Which is nice for when on trips.
- thedance 7y agoThanks. I am familiar with why you want location data in photos. I am not familiar with any justification for why this data cannot be acquired from my mobile.
- wl 7y agoIf I'm using a standalone camera, I don't want to be fiddling with other devices just to get geotagging working.
- ghaff 7y agoIt possibly could be done in real-time using Bluetooth but I doubt it would be reliable and remember that higher end cameras might be writing out images at maybe 6+ frames/second. Alternatively you can make a point of recording a track on your phone (which tends to be hard on the battery life) and then syncing them up later. But, as someone who has done this, it's a pain in the neck.
- ferongr 7y agoGeotagging on my X-T3 with the Camera remote Android app is very reliable to be honest. And you don't have to query the phone at the same rate as you're taking pictures, it's perfectly sane to assume the same location for 5-10 seconds during a burst.
- ghaff 7y agoFair enough. Though I'm not sure I'm convinced that, today, you're not just better off putting a GPS receiver in the camera. GPS is a bit hard on battery life but with the bigger batteries in these cameras, I'm not sure that's much of an issue. (And of course you can turn it off.)
- ferongr 7y agoDepends. MILCs are generally pretty hard on battery and keeping a constant GPS lock would exacerbate their generally poor "active standby" (camera turned on with the viewfinder or LCD active) battery life. On the other hand, my smartphone, using both GPS and augmented network location services can instead very quickly acquire a lock when needed with minimal battery usage only when needed. And it also has a way larger battery, and the system is generally more optimized.
- jki275 7y agoNot everyone carries a phone, let alone a smartphone. Not everyone wants to. Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable. Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.
- wtallis 7y ago> This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it. A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.
- thedance 7y agoThe combination of the batteries in my phone and my laptop is clearly more capacious than the battery in the laptop alone.