Jobo GPS001 photoGPS Hot Shoe Activated GPS Datalogger

by Jobo

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• ASIN: B001OBRM8W
• Item model number: GPS001
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,205 in Camera & Photo (See Top 100 in Camera & Photo)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 23, 2008

Product Description

Capturing geo-data incl. actual address has never been so simple! Mount the JOBO photoGPS on your camera's hot-shoe and capture the geo-data of each picture by the click of your camera. Coordinate the geo-data and your pictures on the PC or laptop, using the supplied software. In addition to the longitude and latitude, the address - i.e. country, city, street and closest point of interest - is captured in the image file. This enables you to search for specific places, streets or POI without having to tag each picture individually. Software is also included to organize, find and sort pictures.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good but not Great, January 22, 2009

By 

RS Blum "science fiction writer" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jobo GPS001 photoGPS Hot Shoe Activated GPS Datalogger (Electronics)

The GPS in this unit is fast and accurate, which is the primary reason you pay twice what other units cost. It typically takes only a second for the little green light to shine, indicating a lock when outdoors. It has a "hint" button that you can press before entering a building. This will be used if a satellite lock is impossible.

The software supplied with the unit works pretty well. It not only tags the long and lat, it does altitude also. And it will also insert points of interest into your file. It also supports RAW, which is one of the reasons I bought it, by creating XMP sidecar files that Adobe products can use. There are two problems with this, though. The first, and the worst, is that it creates new XMP files; it doesn't insert the geotag data into existing files. That means that after downloading with the Adobe downloader, you have to put off looking at your photos until running the JOBO PhotoGPS program. If you use Bridge or ACR first, your changes are wiped out. This is a major oversight. The next big problem is you MUST have an Internet connection to run the software. It does make sense, because the PhotoGPS program has to query an online database for POI info. However, you cannot disable this. This mean that if you are on safari, etc., you can neither download your GPS data or work with your images. The capacity of the unit is 1024 captures, which means about two days of heavy shooting. It is doubly annoying that the database doesn't include Chile, the place I bought the GPS to work in. And even so, I must be online to geotag. (The database does include the USA, and the database is quite thorough there.)

Lacks: (1) No online manuals. I had to wait to get the product to see how it actually worked. And once I installed the program, it gave me a link to the manual which is on the JOBO website. It should be freely available. (2) No list of areas covered by the data base. (3) The unit's flash drive isn't visible. Again, you must be online for the software to geotag.

Serious problem: As another reviewer said, though the unit will fit cameras with a hot shoe (I have a 5D Mark II), it is quite loose. Sling the camera over your shoulder and the unit goes flying. I've resorted to tape. JOBO should have put some rubber on the foot of the unit or come up with some other securing measure. My unit has already fallen about 5 times, gotten lost in the car twice, and broken open once. Happily, it snapped together.

Good point: When download completes, there will be a KLM file in your tagged directory. You can use this file, so I'm told, with GPS Babel and other programs to do geotagging outside of the supplied software.

Would I recommend it? Yes, with cavets.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Jobo PhotoGPS Finally Released, January 8, 2009

By 

Ina Bechhoefer - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jobo GPS001 photoGPS Hot Shoe Activated GPS Datalogger (Electronics)

I have been waiting for this device for the last 2 years since it was announced at PMA 07.

In the meantime, I tried 3 other GPS taggers. None were satisfactory. I received shipment of mine last week from B&H. It was worth the wait.

There is only a second or two lag time for the GPS to fire. Sometimes it took as much as 15 minutes for other GPS devices to cold start a location.

The process is straightforward. Mount the PhotoGPS on the hotshoe. Take pictures. Download photos. Open the PhotoGPS software. Connect the GPS device via USB. Download data from the GPS. Load the photos into the software. Automatically tag the photos. Raw photos are saved to .XMP sidecar and JPEGs are written directly to the File. Tag accuracy is good. Accuracy is stated as w/in 50 meters. I tested the files in downtown Manhattan last week and the accuracy was usually much better -- dead-on in a large majority of the cases. Edits can be made to the tags.

I use Adobe Lightroom to download my photos. Thus, I have to remember to have Lightroom Read the Metadata from the files to update the Lightroom data and Longitude, Latitude, Altitude, Location, City, State, and Country data are all automatically tagged. Lightroom allows one to see the GPS data on a Google Map by clicking on the coordinates. Any retagging can be done with a free Lightroom plug-in (Geoencode) by jeffrey Freidl. He also has a Proximity Search plug-in for Lightroom. See http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies

I found 2 minor problems:
1. The device fits loosely in the hotshoe of both my Canon EOS D40 and my Canon G10. I solved the problem by putting some glue on the side rims outside the slider and let it dry. This gives the hotshoe connector a bit of grab, so the GPS device no longer slips off.

2. The internal flash is not triggered when the flash is utilized, so the GPS device must be removed in order to use the internal flash. If you take a picture before or after removing the device, the software will interpolate the gps coordinates. Also there is a GeoHint button to help assist tagging when inside or when the device is off.

I would give the Jobo PhtoGPS a "5" rating if one did not have to remove the device to use the flash.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not ready for Mac/Aperture - more trouble than it's worth., May 11, 2009

By 

Sam Edwards - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jobo GPS001 photoGPS Hot Shoe Activated GPS Datalogger (Electronics)

Bought the Jobo Photo GPS for use with my canon cameras. The mac software looked promising until I tried to make some use of the GPS data in Apple's Aperture. There doesn't seem to be a way to get the GPS data into the program.
A quick experiment with Adobe Lightroom confirmed that worked fairly well.
The question you have to ask yourself is how much fooling around are you willing to put up with in order to have geo-tagged photos? First you have to charge the unit with the supplied USB cord. Then you have to use up the hot shoe on your camera. The unit doesn't seem too well connected to my Cannon 1Ds Mk III or 5D. Extra care needs to be taken so that it doesn't go flying off. Then you have to copy the images to your hard drive and run their utility before importing to a compatible photo library program.
I think I'm going to wait until the next generation of digital cameras has GPS built in. Taking great photos is complicated enough without adding more gadgets.