Gps4cam is an easy-to-use app that helps all people geotag their photos no matter which camera they are using. As of today there are different ways to have your photos geotagged:

• Buy a camera with a built-in GPS
• Buy a GPS module that can be plugged to your camera
• Manually geotag your photos with one of the several tools out there such as Picasa

The first 2 solutions are quite expensive. We can agree that all photographers out there don’t have cameras with built-in GPS and  are not all willing to spend $150+ to get a GPS module. The third option is less expensive though but very time-consuming as it requires geotagging every single picture yo take. It is also not precise as you will have to choose an approximate location on a map to geotag your photos.

gps4cam is an affordable  alternative solution to all the option cited above.

Unlike other geotagging apps that you could find, gps4cam doesn’t require any manual syncing between your smartphone’s time and your camera’s time.

Many people have been asking us what is the right process to follow to use gps4cam. The truth is that gps4cam offers several possibilities and depending on your preferences you can opt for one of those possibilities.

The golden rule when using gps4cam is: “Never change your camera’s time between the start of your gps4cam trip and the end of this trip”. By “end of trip”, I mean the moment you shoot the QRCode(s). The reason behind this, is that gps4cam desktop (the desktop tool that processes your photos and adds the GPS locations to each photo) uses the QRCode to determine the difference between your camera’s time and your smartphone’s time. If you change the time then the calculation will be biased, and your photos might be geotagged with a wrong location.

Below are the different possible processes

1. You can make short gps4cam trips

Some of our users prefer to make short trips whether a trip per day, a trip per visited city/country or a trip per time zone. This will work well. There are some points to respect though:

• If you don’t care about your camera’s time and you don’t change it during your trips (even if you cross several countries and/or time zone), you can record as many trips as you want and photograph the QRcodes at any time you want (e.g. once you are back home). Please note that gps4cam will automatically correct your photos’ time during the geotagging process.
• If you want to keep the right time on your camera, remember that you should not change you camera’s time during a gps4cam trip. What you can do is to shoot the QRcode of the trip before you change your camera’s time and then you can change your camera’s time and start a new trip. By default, gps4cam desktop looks for the QRCodes only within the last photographed photos (for a faster geotagging process). If your QRcodes are shot in between several trips, you need to go to gps4cam desktop preferences and check the option that tells the tool to look for the QRCodes in the whole folder.

2. You can make a single gps4cam trip no matter how long your travel/trip is

Some of our users prefer to start gps4cam and let it run during the whole travel (even if it lasts days or weeks). By doing so, they have a single gps4cam trip even if they have crossed several countries and time zones. No worries about that, gps4cam desktop will use all the data from your phone to change the photos’ time and put the right one in the metadata. It will also handle time zone changes. Again, the golden rule is not to change your camera’s time between the beginning and the end of your trip.

3. For people who use GPX files with LightRoom instead of QRcodes and gps4cam desktop to geotag their photos

Some of our users use LightRoom to geotag their photos. gps4cam allows all users to generate a GPX file with all the information needed to geotag their photos. Since gps4cam desktop is not used in this workflow, we advise our users to sync their camera’s time and their smartphone’s time before starting the trip in order to avoid any manual work on LightRoom. We also advise not to change your camera’s time during the trip. gps4cam allows you to send over the GPX files directly through Dropbox. More details about this topic can be found here.

So to sum it up, you can use gps4cam at your convenience. Just make sure to follow some important rules so your photos can be properly geotagged.