Customer Reviews

Jobo GPS001 photoGPS Hot Shoe Activated GPS Datalogger

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I had originally thought of buying the Nikon GPS for my D90 but when I was trying to order one they weren't in stock yet. What few reviews I read on the Nikon unit only gave them middle of the road reviews. I had read early about the JOBO PhotoGPS and the reviews were great as they are here on Amazon.

It acquires a fix very fast. I would say in less than 1 second. It has even gotten a fix in my house. Reviewers post that their unit fits loosely on their camera's hotshoe. But I have found mine to have a very snug fit where it will not come off the camera until I remove it. The software is easy to use to tag your photo's.

I have read that some people find it less than satisfactory as these GPS units don't show direction. My hand held Garmin unit won't show direction either if I'm not moving. And I don't see any need to know what direction the camera was pointing in in a photo. But this unit captures latitude, longitude and altitude. The info says it is accurate within 10 meters, which is normal for any GPS, but I have found it accurate within several feet.

I'm very pleased with the JOBO PhotoGPS and find it very accurate and very easy to use.

Although seducing in many aspects, the photoGPS is not well thought in my opinion.

I will let you judge from the list below.

First the good news and the main reasons why I bought it.

+ Very light, it is easy to handle. Just fix it on your flash unit and go in the field.

+ In contrast to most hand help GPS devices that are working in continuous mode (consuming so a lot of energy) and often are slow to start, the PhotoGPS will start very quickly and work only when you shoot pictures as it is triggered by the contact with the flash unit. If you are out in the field, you will be very happy to have something working for a few weeks rather than a day or two.


Now the bad news

- The software provided by Jobo did not work on my new Mac Book and on a laptop with Windows XP. It did eventually work on a third computer using Windows XP (you will realize I have tried hard!). Other Mac users seem to report similar problems.

- There is no miracle, you still have to download all the pictures and the GPS data on your computer to get the pictures georeferenced. There are plenty of free software doing this for you if you already have a GPS.

- The software is not well thought as it will tag anything found in the picture folder you indicate. If you use a GPS in Region A on a first day, take pictures without GPS on day 2 in Region B, and use again GPS on day 3 in Region C, all shots taken in Region B will receive coordinates from region A and C, even if you have been on another continent. It will moreover take you ages to remove the wrong tags manually. It would be so easy to allows users to set a time buffer (e.g. 5 min) to prevent you from wrongly georeferencing anything falling outside this time buffer after the last GPS recording.

- If you do not want to record coordinates, there is no on/off button. You have to remove the GPS unit.

- If you do wildlife photography and quickly get over 1000 pictures (burst photography), you will have to reset/empty the GPS after 1000 records.

- If you take many shots in a short time, most recordings will be duplicates while a time buffer would allow you to go around this problem.

- The USB cover of the GPS is small and loosely fixed: you are likely to lose it the first time you remove it.

- You can't use flash and GPS at the same time (but I knew that so that was not a problem for me)

- Accuracy is not as good as what you get with most GPS (I also knew that) but unfortunately the accuracy is not documented.

- The connection with my Canon 40D could have been better (although it wasn't as bad as what has been described in other reviews).


So conceptually, PhotoGPS is great (hence the positive reviews in magazines) but the reality was for me very different (showing that reviews in most magazines were probably not based on serious tests)

I'd like to tell everybody how well this product worked, but I lost it before I could really find out. It has a fatal design flaw (well,actually two). The attachment from the logger to the camera flash mount has an intermediate piece. You slip that piece onto the camera flash mount and the gps logger onto that mount. That means there are two mount points that DO NOT LOCK. The gps logger is easily pushed off at either mount point. I lost mine taking pictures of some eco-cleanup activity on a sand dune in central CA. I'd only had it a week, bought it for this trip. Just normal behavior carrying my camera around on a shoulder strap.

The other flaw is that you cannot use a pop-up flash with this device mounted. I use a Nikon D80 or D90. The flash bumps into the logger when it opens on both cameras. I don't know about everybody else, but I use fill-flash outdoors quite a bit. Not with this gadget attached.

The PhotoGPS does an excellent job of taking down the geocoordinates of where a picture was taken. But as someone else here has noted, it fits very, very loosely into the hot shoes of my cameras. It has fallen off with enough frequency for me to take it off the camera whenever I'm not actually clicking and put it in my pocket. I'm going to try using tape or some other quick fix, but I think Jobo should have provided something in the box that would help with the loose fits.

But the unit is pretty rugged since it has survived the many falls (even on hard surfaces). If it had stopped working after just one fall, I'd be giving it a one star review.

Now, if only Canon would start manufacturing SLRs with built-in GPS...sigh.

I have a Nikon D90 and purchased a GP-1 to do the geotagging. The GP-1 was terrible. It could take more than 30 seconds to get a fix and worse yet was that very often it would not get a signal. I found myself spending a lot of time just waiting. Another thing that I did not like was the cable that connects the GPS unit to the camera is suseptible to being moved in the normal course of handling the camera and this movement is then transferred to the connector in the camera, potentially creating a loose conection over time.

The JOBO, on the other hand has not yet failed to get a signal. Better still is that there is no waiting. Just shoot as normal and the JOBO wakes up and captures the GPS coordinates and logs them into the unit. The connection on the D90 is snug enough to hold it into place with being too snug.

There is no need to syncronize the clock on your camera to the JOBO because the GPS coordinates are paired to your photos by the time interval between shots... and it works well.

Sidecar (.xmp) files are created during the matching process and additional IPTC information is downloaded on street address, city, state and country. Nearby points of interest are also recorded. If you use Adobe Lightroom 2 then you have some choices that are rather nice. You can delete the .xmp after you have imported your photos into your catalog or you can keep them. Apparenty the data in the .xmp file is written into the .lrcat file. If you keep them then you'lll be albe to see the GPS and related IPTC information in the RAW file. If you delete them then you will not see that information in the RAW but, with either choice, the GPS and IPTC information gets written into the jpg files.

Lightroom has many features and one that I find very convenient is the export presets. I direct Lr2 to rename the file to the IPTC address keywords plus a sequential number. So after processing the RAW files and as I export them to .jpg, they get renamed from _DSC0001.nef to, for example, "Belfair State Park 001.jpg".

I highly recommend the JOBO over the GP-1 anyday and to anyone.

I bought this after alot of research of geo-tagging solutions. I would have preferred to have a solution that wrote directly to the XMP file but those solutions were twice the price and required a cable between the logger and the camera (not very elegant, although others out there swear by those solutions). At this price point this unit works very well. It syncs to the satellites quickly and is very accurate. Yes, it does add an extra step to your import and post processing workflow but it is not terribly time consuming and doesn't really seem to slow me down. I found this to be a very good value compromise and I highly recommend this unit.

I have had this unit for over 6 months now, if I had not tethered it to my camera with a lens keeper, I would have lost it many times over. It does the GPS tagging well, but what good is it if you loose the unit. I would a wait until they fix this issue before I would recommend the product.