More on the ATP Photofinder:We bought ours from
easydevices.co.uk for about £80, together with a card reader which you need if you want to tag images on Compact Flash cards. The USB socket on the ATP reader is mini-USB2, so you need to use the included dongle in order to connect most USB card readers.
The ATP does the job, but there are shortcomings:
1. the battery life can be pretty dire. I managed to record about an hour's track with a pair of new alkaline AAAs from Superdrug, but there wasn't enough juice when I got back to geotag the files. I thoroughly recommend the use of top-brand batteries, like Duracell, or get yourself some high capacity NiMHs from the likes of
play.com2. the display is extremely difficult to see. In order to save power, the backlight goes off about about five seconds. If you've taken a lot of photos, the geotagging process can take a long time and without the display on, you have no idea that its still working.
3. time for GPS acquisition from cold is very long - you have to wait a good five minutes before the device will start logging your position.
4. the KML track files that the device creates are not correctly date-stamped. Given the device has such a large storage capacity, you can end up with a lot of track files in the device (which you can then copy to your SD card), but they are all datestamped 1st Jan 2007.
I think the GPS accuracy issue is common to all small, portable GPS devices - they've never going to work that well in built-up environments since the receivers all require a clear view of the sky to operate properly.
So, although it might be a clever product, I'm afraid the "user experience" leaves a bit to be desired.
Here's
a gallery of photos I geotagged using the ATP Photofinder. Picasa does a much better job of handling geotagged photos than Flickr, helped by the use of Google Maps, of course.
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