Things don't always work out the way you planned . . . .
Our weekend plans were simple. Go to a place we know, use the trip planning tools the way we had thought we would, and stay in one campsite for a couple of nights so we could hook up to shore power to test it out and to do a bit of cooking. In short, test everything before undertaking a semi-serious trip. Long story short, everything went according to plan . . . except our plan to geotag our images. Fortunately, all is well that ends well.
We planned a 3-day trip, having to move one of the days from a Friday to a Monday because of work. We took off early enough on Saturday morning to head back to the National Park Utrechtse Heuvelrug for a morning shoot. This time we went to a different entrance, but wound up hiking far enough to eat lunch at the same place we did last time. Then hiked back, photographing whenever it suited our fancy. I went light again with the Q2MR and I must say, any concerns I had about it being useful for landscape photography are long gone. It is a gem of a camera.
Anyway, we headed over to our camping area at Camping het Leersumse Veld to settle in for a couple of days by de Leersumse Plassen. We made 4 photo excursions - an afternoon shoot on Saturday, morning and afternoon shoots on Sunday, and a Monday morning shoot. It was on these shoots that I was pretty good (not perfect, but good enough) about using the Lightroom Mobile app on my phone to take pictures of the locations I photographed with the cameras. In theory the app would geotag the images and load them up into Lightroom. Ann discovered that Gaia GPS had a photo function, so she turned on the track mode for our hikes, and took images both from the Gaia app and the Lightroom Mobile App.
When I got home, I fired up Lightroom and found out that the Lightroom Mobile app did its thing automatically. Excellent! I went to the Map module and there were my images. Then I thought, “WTF?”
You see, Ann and I never made it down to the southern lake (the grouping of yellow flags with the “4” and “2” next to each other). And we definitely did not head way down towards the other “2” and the two un-numbered yellow boxes. As the Chewbacca Defense skit said in South Park, “This does not make sense!”
Apparently, either my phone’s GPS is all messed up, or . . . who knows. Ann, however came to save the day. She was as perplexed as I was about why my cell-phone images were “off.” She dug around a bit and discovered that you can, in fact, load up GPX tracks into Lightroom, and associate images with those tracks, syncing them up by time stamps. Below is a couple of tracks (in blue) with the corresponding images from those shoots!
So now, we can go to a location, and then click on one of the photo tags and see the image that was made from that location as well as some corresponding data such as the image was made on 3/3/24 at 3:43:01 (yes, down to the second), shot with my 23mm lens at ISO 124, shutter speed of 1/240th of a second at f/7.1. Exactly what we wanted to be able to check out! Also note, there are no images by the southern lake, or much farther south than we hiked.
So now, instead of having to remember to take an iPhone photo each time we make a real photograph (something we both forgot to do more than once), all we need to do is turn on our Gaia GPS app when we start a hike (and make sure our camera clocks are roughly the same as our phones) and sync up the images later!
Unfortunately, as Ann will tell you, getting me to remember to turn on my app before each hike is easier said than done. But it’s an easy plan that works and, since we’re both planning to run the tracks (back-ups are always good), at least one of us should remember . . . and then tell Dan to turn on his app.