Sounds like something is wrong, either in your camera, or your phone, or it hadn’t yet locked on for your location. Did your phone show you were in the middle of the sea?
Just a little, or a significant amount? How old is your camera battery?
How do you transfer the coordinates later? Do you save them on your phone? If they are correct on your phone, why would they not be the same on your D850?
Draining the battery - for your phone, is the GPS always on?
I have two batteries, EN-EL15 from my old D750, and EN-EL15C, that came with my D780. The new one seems to last “forever”, but it has a larger capacity and it is newer. I think your D850 takes the same battery. My battery issues are with my Leica M10, that uses a very slim battery to fit the narrower depth of the camera body. The Visoflex, with or without using GPS, uses more battery power, a good reason to use it sparingly.
Me? I’d like to be able to use the GPS recording when I want/need to do so, but not to leave it on permanently.
The camera has to act as WiFi hotspot, for the phone to connect to, so it has to be on all the time and the phone has to maintain its connection all the time
Well, you have to establish the WiFi network from the phone to the camera, so there is no point in maintaining that when you are not shooting.
My M10 has a simple on/off switch for GPS, so I only turn it on when needed. I think the Nikon has a similar setting, but I’m still not finished setting that up. Maybe I’ll sort it out this weekend.
In India especially, I’d like to know what city I was near, as I forget those things over time.
For me, no, it’s definitely not worth the hassle (and battery drain) of linking my DSLR to my smart phone.
Surely, the ‘smart’ way to capture the GPS coords of where you are is to simply snap a quick picture of your locale with your smart phone? OK, so that doesn’t embed the location into any photos you take with your DSLR, and you do have to remember to grab a quick snap on your phone at every location you visit, but it does give you a simple way of knowing where you’ve been.
I did; I found the entire setup procedure in my purchased book “Mastering Nikon D780” by Darrell Young, and also in the Nikon manual, but I haven’t yet gotten it to work. I put it aside for a few days a week ago, and haven’t gotten back to it. I did manage to almost get it working, for GPS only, but something is still configured incorrectly. Will do it all over from the beginning, sometime “soon”. In the meantime, my Visoflex on my M10 works perfectly.
This video repeats what @Joanna and others are saying. I use the Gaia app just like shown in the video. You are making this overly hard for yourself and will likely loose info when the phone to camera link fails and/or one of the batteries gets exhausted.
I think the iPhone and Apple Watch are about the same. My watch is more likely to get a good view of the sky, but I’ve had luck with getting a good signal in my breast pocket.
In any case — both are very accurate in my experience! Check out the screen capture from Flickr above. I was standing on a pathway next to a river, near a bend in that river, which is exactly where it put me completely automatically.
That’s a smart way but a little laborious. Much easier is to use a GPS track app like the one I suggested. It does not kill my phone or watch battery much at all. On the other hand, using wifi for anything on my camera drains the camera battery very quickly.
Perhaps I will just forget all about this for now, and simply use the Visoflex; turn on GPS, wait until it has a GPS lock, and shoot. Not always, but whenI want to.
Since the iPhone is always in my pocket, eventually I’ll get the GPS working like in the documentation.
Thanks for all the advice.
Perhaps the question “Is adding GPS co-ordinates a good idea…” is answered, with the answer being “no”, other than special occasions when I want to know in the future where I was.
I’ve been trying to find all my photos from my old Windows computer, meaning I need to re-learn Windows, but last night I found out that I wasn’t a total dummy, and I filled a 1-gb portable drive with everything from my Lenovo. This included ALL the photos stored on it, USA, India, Thailand, Australia, England, and more… I spent a while reviewing them - took a while until my memories kicked in, and I started remembering each of the photos. I would have loved it if I had GPS back then, and could look at a map showing me where I was when I took the photos… But, the Nikon D70 didn’t have all these high-tech features. For that matter, neither did my film cameras.
Dreaming out loud - I wish there was something like a Visoflex that could go on the accessory shoe on my Nikon and feed it the GPS information when requested. Ain’t gonna happen, at least not in my lifetime.
The only devices from Nikon are only compatible with certain cameras (not yours) So the only option is from somewhere like Amazon.
Oh, and any device you get will draw current from your camera and flatten your battery. Which is why some of us have suggested you simply take a photo with your phone and transfer the coordinates from that afterwards.
Well, I know about the battery issue, and I almost always go around with more than one battery. It’s like my car - drive slow, get lots of miles before empty, but drive more “spiritedly” and watch the gas gauge fall. My Mazda will tell me at any given moment what my “mpg” is (miles per gallon).
If I remember to do so, I’ll take a photo with my phone, to get the GPS coordinates, but I doubt I’ll remember to do so. Or, if I’m using the Leica, I’ll just turn on GPS for the Visoflex and wait five minutes or so. With the Nikon - once I get Snapbridge set up, that’s another option. But 99.9% of the time, I’ll ignore GPS. Interesting idea, but maybe it’s usually not that important.
Nikon is a lost cause - all they think about is mirrorless, and since that’s where the sales are, I can’t blame them. But for that, the D880 would likely be available by now.
Thanks for pointing that out. It may be that cameras are not permitted either. Since you are aware of this, and I completely forgot about this, where can we look to find places where GPS is not permitted?
