Customer Reviews

GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Pro

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Although the GPS unit itself is quite simple to use, and the built in softly accented female British voice is actually quite pleasant, the software bundled with this unit can only be described as absymal. I bought the Pro version because it was supposed to "work seamlessly with Adobe Bridge" and "integrate into the RAW photo processing flow." While it does work with RAW images, in no way does it "work seamlessly" with Adobe Bridge. It has no idea Adobe Bridge is over there on my other monitor just waiting to be "integrated with." It functions as a totally stand alone program, and, quite frankly, not all that well. The documentation for the software is simply embarrasing. I am not a computer newbie, but I found the installation process quirky and confusing on my XP machine, with all sorts of windows popping up, as if the program was attempting to install itself and the hardware drivers simultaneously. Once the desktop installation hurdle was cleared, I attempted to install it on my laptop (you're allowed three installations). After installing and subsequently uninstalling the program twice without being able to get past the activation screen, I visited GiSTEQ's web site for help. After finding a thread in their online forum about the apparently well known "activation loop" issue, I followed their instructions and downloaded another copy of the installation files. After making two more attempts, I apparently hit some secret combination of keystrokes that allowed the program to install on my laptop. Hurray! Off we go! After plugging in the GPS with the provided USB cable, I went to the hardware setting menu, where I found a drop down box with 39(!) COM ports to choose from. Don't worry though, because if you just hit the "Connect" button, the GPS will connect itself via the USB port and ignore all those COM ports it supposedly found. The hardware menu, however, will tell you that you're connected via a random COM port, and this port number changes every time you connect and disconnect the GPS. Just ignore that.

Once I got past all that and started to actually use the software for geotagging my photos, I found that it functions just as poorly as I'd come to expect at this point. For some reason it sometimes imported only selected RAW photos from a given directory, randomly refusing to import others, even after multiple tries. After importing a half dozen JPGs, I had to shut the program down and then reopen it before the photos showed up. The steps for embedding the lat/lon information in your photos is, incredibly, missing from the instructions, and as user "un-friendly" as this software is that's a serious omission on GISTEQ's part. After poking around a while, plodding through the sloppily worded and slightly cryptic text boxes that occasionally popped up, I eventually figured it out. Now that I've been using this unit for a while, I've found a new quirk -once in a while when I import my photos the times between the camera and the GPS are off by several hours - even though my camera and GPS are "synchronized" before each photo trip following GISTEQ's instructions.

I will probably continue to use this thing because I've already sunk a hundred bucks into it, but I have almost zero confidence that it will reliably and consistently do its job. I would not recommend this unit to anybody until some improvements are made to that torturous software - and there's many "opportunities" there, believe me. I've bought lots of shareware over the years that functioned better and was much better documented than this supposedly polished commercial code.

Hey GISTEQ - pfffft!

The device has some basic lacks in comparison with analogues (Qstarz, iBlue):
1. Rather poor quality of manufacturing:
- The shaky case
- Internal parts are badly fixed and dangle in the case. It was necessary to assort the device and to fix internal parts.
2. Unsatisfactory quality of functioning:
- Too wide disorder of coordinates of logged points in one fix place
- POI dont logged w/o timestamp
3. The unsatisfactory external protocol/interface. It is incompatible with 3dparty programs for reading of logs (i.e. GPSBabel)
4. The PhotoTrackr SW has the inconvenient logic of work and the limited interface in free version. There is no possibility to test all functions of Pro version as trial.