when are canon likely to produce a gps enabled camera?

[paul -]

Somehow I can imagine a common theme to the new posts this forum would have if cameras had GPS:<p>"<i>How do I block or erase the GPS metadata from my pics? I love to share my landscape photos, but don't want anybody else to know my secret getaway locations. The fewer that know, the better."</i>

[mike sisk]

I'm not sure why everyone seems to think the idea of location-labeled imagery is so

outlandish.

 

I can think of dozens of applications where such a thing would be incredibly useful. Heck,

years ago when I worked as a field geologist a GPS-enabled digital camera would have

saved me hours back in the office annotating maps with image locations.

 

And imagine what you could do if pictures on the internet contained accurate time and

location meta-data. You could do searches for images restricted to geographic areas and

times. Things like, "show me images of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina". And

pictures afterwards.

[kai_griffin]

OK, the idea might seem silly to a lot of us (I thought so at first), and I think it's probably overstating it to suggest that Canon have "missed a trick badly" by not putting GPS into the 5D... but I have a feeling that down the track a few years GPS may well be a common feature in cameras. It's not like saying that cameras ought to have an MP3 player or a waffle iron in them: there really is a potentially useful side to having fairly precise positional information in EXIF, without having to merge that data from another device. Not for everyone, of course... but even for the traveller who rattled off a thousand shots while on their global holiday, being able to hone in precisely where various shots were taken might well be something that could even appeal to the "average" consumer. Particularly if the positional information could be converted on-the-fly automagically to something legible like "Preah Vihear Village, Cambodia"; for example, if a product like BreezeBrowser looked up the coordinates and returned a place name for them. Definitely has legs, this idea.

[kai_griffin]

PS: I use travel as an example in my previous post from some experience: I have an enormous number of images of various temples in Cambodia, and believe me, they all look alike after awhile. Correctly labelling them is personally not so important to <i>me</i>, because I have no professional need to be that accurate, but if I were an archaelogist or a specialist in Ankorian history, a camera that could automatically record exactly where every bit of temple fragment or statue amongst ruins was shot would be an incredibly useful tool!

[conrad_fischer1]

There are some cameras that do have this capability. It seems to me that at this point in time it is still very much a niche market. Ricoh has had a pretty nice camera with this out for a year or so. I know of some uses in field surveys or even real estate. The software that is used with the Ricoh even will download an aerial image where the picture was taken and show the direction of the shot.

 

http://www.geospatialexperts.com/ricoh.html

[KenPapai]

GPS is silly for 99.999% (I made up that number but could be off by a factor of 100) of shots you'd take with a DSLR.

Can GPS account for a 1.6 crop factor when shooting something far away with a 200mm or 400mm lens? How about a 10mm lens on your 20D? Which thing in the wide photo shot outside is the GPS referencing? Why not include an angle/inclinometer in the camera, so depending on the sensor's plane angle you can "determine where you are".<p>

I suppose railroads could appreciate GPS-enabled cameras. Good argument there. What about long-haul trucks -- GPS and automatically transmitting images to the central office where the truck is at anytime. Pure speculation, but nothing to do with taking good pictures.

[timcorridan]

how about a "Lo-Jack" systom in case it gets stolen

[phule]

<< but nothing to do with taking good pictures >>

 

Because everything on a camera now will produce better photos for you, right? What a silly argument.

[Spearhead]

If it helps me get home faster, especially late at night, I'm all for it.

[PuppyDigs]

Actually a far more universally useful onboard feature would a pheromone dispenser.

You want your models to become all hot and bothered. Press a button, pull down

a menu and select "androstenone" and they take on a perfect "come thither" look. Perhaps

an agressive bear or boar is bothering you? Dispense androstenol and they'll soften right

up, maybe even take a shine to you.

 

Most photographers on a gear forum are geeks aren't they?

[ilkka_nissila]

There is thing of recording the shooting location for purposes of return to the site after decades, or by other people. For example, a friend of mine is a forest pathologist and for him, the ability to record the exact location of some bug eating trees would be of great value. The thing is that it needs to be integrated so that it's fully automatic. Otherwise it's just another bookkeeping thing that's sometimes forgotten.

 

Or have people forgotten that photography is also used for scientific purposes?

 

Another thing is that when future generations look at old photos, the ability to see exactly where your grandfather took a shot and when would be something that would be valued by some people. And if it's all automatic and happens on every shot, quite a bit of documentation about the world will take place.

 

Nikon's implementation has the obvious problem that you need to connect it to a GPS unit AFAIK. If it is eventually integrated into the camera, it will be of great value.

[Spearhead]

So much for mystery...

[yanglee]

One man's treasure is another's trash. To add a specific capability, no matter how trivial, eventually increases 1). cost, 2). weight, 3) complexity. Dear Mike Dodd, are you willing to pay for Stephen's toaster (landscape), Puppy's pheromone amplifier (fashion/nude), someone elses' bear spray (wildlife), shark repellant (underwater), insect repellant (macro), smoke screen (war journalism), dictionary (travel), pimple zapper (fashion), stungun (street) all on your 5D? They're all pretty cheap individually. For goodness's sake it doesn't even have an onboard flash! I think an open bay would be nice and you can spend to your hearts' content on add-on modules. As for me, shave off everything non-photographic, non-construction and give me the most affordable full frame and I am a happy man.

[mike_smith2]

Err am I misisng something, the GPS will tell you where you are, but not in which direction the photograph has been taken from where you are, so you not only need GPOS but also compass functionality as well to be fully useable?

[lester_wareham]

This is one of these markiting department driven features that is intended for the mass market. The idea is your PC software looks up the location and labels up the location for you.

 

I can see some advantage for this, I often put the OS coordinates in landscape shot meta data so I can find the location again. Similar for other subjects sometimes.

 

However I would not want to pay more, have a heavier camera, more battery consumption or lower reliability for it.

[mike_dodd]

Well my original post has generated a remarkable amount of comment most of which I totally disagree with!

The reason I first started thinking about on camera GPS rather than taking a GPS along with me is that its always there and stamps every shot. I�ve used GPS in my work for many years and have a variety of units including sub metre accuracy devices so know all about their limitations but the potential benefits vastly outweigh these limitations.

For example consider the 500 images on my �habitats� page:

 

http://www.amanita-photolibrary.co.uk/photo_library/BI_habitats/index.htm

 

I want to go out and rephotograph these locations many of which I first photographed 10 or 20 years ago to show changes in these habitats (I am an ecologist). There is absolutely no way I could remember where the exact location is to go back to and at the time I took the picture I had no idea that I would want to go back there, so I only recorded the nearest village or name of the approximate area. But if the camera had recorded the location then there would be much less of a problem, even if I had to go to a clearing in the wood for a good GPS reading. Just assume for a moment that decent civilian gps did exist even back then.

 

The other issue is that now on digital we take thousands of shots, not unusual to get through 10,000 or more images per year so labelling them (or transferring gps data to them) is a major problem. So having the unit built into the camera is certainly not a luxury, not should it be expensive since the gps chips are cheap and small. The latest phones and cameras that have gps built in do use real gps not some calculation using the mobile phone transmitters and they are small and not ridiculously expensive.

By the way I take the point about not wanting to let other people know your exact location seriously and if you are selling the image you can remove that bit of data. But as an ecologist looking at the future long after we are dead then I would want future generations to know where I took the images so they could go back and see what effect we are having on the planet. Already there are projects looking at images from 100 years ago and seeing what effects things like water abstraction is having on ecosystems but they need to know the exact location so they can look at the growth on the same trees etc.

[kai_griffin]

If the only criteria for whether a particular technological has merit or not were whether we've have been able to live without in the past, then almost nothing new would pass the test, for clearly many generations of ancestors precede us who, for example, had no concept of even a camera. Why would anyone need a telephone in an age where foot messengers can deliver a letter to nearly everyone they know from between a few minutes or a few days at most? I've been guilty of poo-pooing some ideas because I've probably reached an age where some unconventional ideas sound outlandish, useless or ridiculously over-the-top. I thought that about cameras in mobile telephones, until somebody quickly ran through a list of reasons why it could be a genuinely useful tool. Today, nearly every phone has a camera in it, so clearly the number of people who found it a great idea outnumbered my stuck-in-the-past way of thinking by a huge majority.<p>If anything, the GPS idea makes even more sense. The camera already records date/time, so why not position, too? Nearly every collection of photographs I've ever flipped through in somebody's house has handwritten positional information scribbled on the back of it along the lines of "Mom and Molly at Nigara Falls", together with the date. Cameras can do the date now, and the technology exists to do the Niagara Falls part, too, so why not? Now, will somebody please work on the facial recognition part, so that Mom & Molly don't get left out :-) ?

[William Kahn]

I can see specifc, job-related applications for having a GPS receiver in the camera. Several years ago, when I worked for the U.S. Forest Service, I hiked many miles of trails in Southern California looking for potential encroachments on habitats of the endangered Arroyo Toad. Basically, that meant logging and photgraphing every place where a trail crossed a creekbed. I logged positions using a backpack model Trimble Asset Surveyor - very accurate. I kept track of the photos on the survey sheet with what I thought was a cleverly devised code. Problem: Most places in Southern California where trails cross creeks look pretty much alike, and I frequently had a hard time matching a shot with its location. Having a GPS record with the shot would have saved me hours of additional work.

 

There's another aspect of all this: What you get with GPS is a set of coordinates, either Lat./Long. or UTC. This means investing in some expensive mapping software to do the locating for you, or getting maps with accurate coordinate indexing and plotting the locations yourself (which is what I did). So, if you really don't need GPS for a specific purpose, how badly do you need it?

 

Hell, 50 years from now, newborns will probably have GPS units implanted before they leave the delivery room. Problem solved.....

[Greg M]

Geez, I didn't realize I've missed so much all these years by not having a GPS enabled camera. If they could only get one to imprint latitude and longitude on the picture I guess everyone would be in a state of bliss.

 

Mike, you've missed the trick. Cameras are for taking pictures. I have a feeling the number of people actaully needing this feature is way less than you expect, otherwise someone would already be doing it.

[phule]

<< Mike, you've missed the trick. Cameras are for taking pictures. >>

 

Then why do cameras have all the features that they have now, including all the existing EXIF data in digital images? It's absurd to draw a line and say "oh, if you have this feature you have a camera but if you have this other feature you don't." Such an argument is absurd and foolish.

 

A camera is a tool. All the things added to it make the tool better for some. I'm sure there are tons of 350D owners that have no need for mirror lockup, but it's there. Do you rail against Canon for including mirror lockup in their base model?

 

No one in this thread gnashed their teeth when Canon released the /very specialized/ 20Da but somehow the suggestion of adding GPS is "beyond the pale." Such arguments show how little people understand what a camera really is.

[William Kahn]

EXIF data is specifically related to the image itself, how and when it was acquired. It's something I look at for a variety of reasons, such as selecting images with sufficient dynamic range for Merge to HDR in CS2. Or setting/verifying a copyright date. In other words, things a lot of people normally document with their images. Precise geographic location isn't one of them. If I label a shot "Mission San Jose de Laguna", I know where it is. It isn't necessary to map it. If I need to map it, I'll take a GPS unit with me, or my trusty old map and compass.

 

Also, I suspect there are a lot more folks using mirror lock-up than you think.

 

By the way, Mike - the reason (and I mean the only reason) GPS is being added to cell phones is because it's mandated by law. Ultimately, cell phones will be incorporated into the 9-1-1 system, so that public safety dispatchers will know where you are if you call for help.

[phule]

<< I know where it is. It isn't necessary to map it. >>

 

Why is it so difficult for people to be able to distinguish their needs from others needs? Why do so many people in this thread take the attitude that Mike is suggesting Canon force everyone to buy GPS-enabled cameras? These knee-jerk responses are astonishing.

 

<< Also, I suspect there are a lot more folks using mirror lock-up than you think. >>

 

Pick any feature on a modern camera sold to consumers and you will find people not using it. But even though the feature was included they still use the camera and they still make wonderful photos. Inclusions of a feature does not prevent anyone from taking photos.

[w_t1]

some geeks may want a gps unit on their camera, some folks may want a penis enlarger on theirs, to each his own.

[iandangerfield]

Are we getting into macro photography now?

[sergey_oboguev]

According to my investigation and inquiry with GPS manufacturers there does *not* currently exist GPS or Pocket PC based unit that would have magnetic compass sensor and capture its data, along with coordinates and timestamp.

 

Some handheld units do have compass sensor but they do not record its reading in the waypoint.

 

No Pocket PC attachment that I am aware of features magnetic/electronic compass sensor, even 2-axis one.