Identifying locations after to shoot

[Texas hobbyist]

Crazy question, but someone please tell me how you identify your photos and their location when you return home from a long trip...please!!! I just returned for two weeks in Israel and Rome. I have over two thousand shots, many of which will be deleted, but I also have some great shots but no clue where I took them. All ruins and church arches now look alike. There has to be a way better than what I used which was a daily diary of where we've been and the sites we visited. Now I get home and 14623.jpg means nothing to me. I would really appreciate your suggestions as I'm headed to Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas for a month and will be in the same boat when I return with a thousand photos of mountains and streams.

 

[Craig Gillette]

Your photos should have time and date info in the metadata. That gets you to what should be an easy day to day idea of where you were. It's not exact but it's close.

Of course you could post an image with the "wrong" name and it's possible no small number of folks will jump in to help "correct" it.

 

[hypercore360]

Either with built-in or retrofit GPS. I have one for my Nikon, which can be used on multiple Nikon bodies. Relatively inexpensive. Fits onto the hotshoe. Records the location data on the image EXIF.

 

[Texas hobbyist]

Yes sir, I checked that and for most every trip I've ever taken that would be perfect. It was just this one trip to Israel where we were on the move from 6:30 AM to 7:30 PM and at so many different locations I ended up with a number of shots I'm still trying to figure out. I did find an app called Geotag Photos Pro 2 that is recommended for this so I'm checking it out.

99 percent of the time I'd never need it but when you've been in 10 churches by noon you better have a better memory than me when you get back home. Same from Rome, too many statues aren't the big famous ones that are easy to identify.

I'll be better prepared when I head to Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas.

 

[gavin]

3 ways

1) Use GPS in your camera if it has it. This will drain battery

2) Use 3rd party GPS

3) Use your phone to take a photo. Enable GPS and location tracking. I find this quite useful to remember where I went to when I travel. Its on my google map time line

 

[BGD300V1]

Before leaving on a trip I create a folder labeled something like 201907 - UK-Western Med

Beneath that I create folders with all know spots we will visit and use a two digit plus dash prefix.

For example 00-Trip over, 01-London,02-Southampton, etc. I also know I will be taking pics of ships and aircraft etc. So I create 99-ships, 98-aircraft,97-landscapes,96-birds, etc.

I carry a Garmin ETrex 20 and make sure the camera and GPS are time synced when I change batteries.

At the end of the day I transfer the images to my laptop, create a backup on a 1TB ssd drive. I tranfer my track from the Garmin and use Geosetter to GPS tag the images.

I also open the subfolder, select all of the images and use the WIndow File Manager to add tags as needed. For example, the location in words.

If I have the time to spend I might create subfolders like City Wall, Marina, etc.

If I have a nature or landscape shot that I might want to consider for display I copy them to the appropriate high number folders. I move (not copy) the aircraft and ships because I put them out as stock shots.

At the end of the trip I am reasonably well organized for further work.

 

[jmbillings]

Some good suggestions here. I've experimented in the past with a few, but these days I find my geo-brain is usually good enough to remember where I was, and I drag photos on to the map in Lightroom.

Some asides-

I had a GPS enabled camera once, a Sony SLT-A55. A big downside was the time it took to acquire a fix, especially after moving a good distance. So, you could turn on the camera at "interesting church #5", take a few shots, turn it off. The GPS that's recorded is the last known position, which could be your hotel, back home, interesting church #4... technology may well have moved on though.

I also experimented with Google Tracks to record a gpx/kml, and found a Lightroom plugin which would match photo times to the track time and set the location. A problem here was if the camera time was wrong, then you get the wrong location (the plugin did allow an offset so if you could work out it was a couple of timezones out, you could fix it...) but I found I generally kept forgetting to set Tracks to actually record.

I've not tried exporting my google-maps-stalking-data to try again. Perhaps it would work well.

 

[mfinley]

Crazy question, but someone please tell me how you identify your photos and their location when you return home from a long trip...please!!! I just returned for two weeks in Israel and Rome. I have over two thousand shots, many of which will be deleted, but I also have some great shots but no clue where I took them. All ruins and church arches now look alike. There has to be a way better than what I used which was a daily diary of where we've been and the sites we visited. Now I get home and 14623.jpg means nothing to me. I would really appreciate your suggestions as I'm headed to Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas for a month and will be in the same boat when I return with a thousand photos of mountains and streams.

This is a great question and something I learned the hard way.

But It's really easy, I shoot a reference frame prior to taking photos of a location. Sometimes it's the screen of my cell phone with the Evernote, sometimes it's as simple as a sign...





Additionally it might be just a sheet of paper that I write the location on and snap a pic of that, or just open a blank note on my cell phone, type the name and shoot a snap shot of that. Simple and easy.

This is basically the same thing a a hollywood film crew does prior to shooting film...







--
Thanks,
Mike
https://www.instagram.com/mikefinleyco/

 

[hypercore360]

Good preemptive moves to be on top of things by the end of the trip. Might have to adopt a few of the things you've mentioned.

Similarly, I backup things the day's images to a HD and double backup to another HD. They are simply dated, location and for the most part, that's it. For my upcoming trip to California, at the end of the day, I might go through the images for that day, and mark the potential images for editing. Might speed up things to start editing at the end of the trip.

Regarding the Geotagging, I have an external GPS unit that attaches to the hotshoe (works on all my Nikon bodies); the location of course gets tagged into the MetaData. Works well.

Before leaving on a trip I create a folder labeled something like 201907 - UK-Western Med

Beneath that I create folders with all know spots we will visit and use a two digit plus dash prefix.

For example 00-Trip over, 01-London,02-Southampton, etc. I also know I will be taking pics of ships and aircraft etc. So I create 99-ships, 98-aircraft,97-landscapes,96-birds, etc.

I carry a Garmin ETrex 20 and make sure the camera and GPS are time synced when I change batteries.

At the end of the day I transfer the images to my laptop, create a backup on a 1TB ssd drive. I tranfer my track from the Garmin and use Geosetter to GPS tag the images.

I also open the subfolder, select all of the images and use the WIndow File Manager to add tags as needed. For example, the location in words.

If I have the time to spend I might create subfolders like City Wall, Marina, etc.

If I have a nature or landscape shot that I might want to consider for display I copy them to the appropriate high number folders. I move (not copy) the aircraft and ships because I put them out as stock shots.

At the end of the trip I am reasonably well organized for further work.

 

[zachdos]

It is considered as the most simple thing. You have to do simple techniques that will help you out to memories about the shoot after a long trip. First, you have to buy the number of Sd card & hard drive. Then you have to label them after you came back to your stay in the night then create a folder of the day in your laptop or phone about the trip. This will help you out identify your photos and their location when you return home from a long trip.