The device I use and trust to help me geotag photos.

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Product Description

Large data capacity - stores over 256 000 data records: AGL3080 Photo Tracker is a GPS-based data logger designed to provide location information for digital photos. Unlike other similar products AGL3080 does not need driver to operate. When you plug AGL3080 into a computer via USB port it will simply appears as an external drive. The recorded log is standard NMEA format which is compatible with many online tools such as JetPhoto GPSVisualizer etc.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2497 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Amod
• Model: AGL3080
• Dimensions: .50 pounds

Features

• SiRF III chipset for best sensitivity and low speed tracking
• Standard USB 2.0 interface which doubles as an USB Flash Disk
• Works with Windows Mac and Linux based computers
• Long operating time - 15 hours with 3 x AAA batteries
• Windows and Mac photo tagging software included

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Customer Reviews

Not Quite Ready For MAC
With Apple releasing iPhoto '09 with support for geotagged photography I immediately wanted to utilize this new feature set. I do a lot outdoors: Geocaching, Boy Scouts, hiking, bicycling, so I saw a great way to track my "expeditions" through my photography.

I found this GPS Data Logger and it advertises heavily that it is MAC OSX compliant. I looked at the reviews for this device on Amazon and various other websites. Most of the negative comments didn't alarm me as they were for the most part due to a misunderstanding of what the device does or they didn't like a feature set.

What I have learned is this:
1. GPS Photo Tracker software - This software comes in the box from AMOD and embeds the GPS locations into the digital photograph JPEGs. This is written only for Microsoft Windows and does exist for Macintosh OSX. In fact if you have Vista 64 don't bother installing the software that comes with the device; it will crash. This is a known bug and AMOD has a fixed version on their website.

2. The GPS device looks like a thumb drive to any computer and the GPS tracks are stored in ASCII. This allows any computer to look at the data, there are no proprietary formats or synchronization drivers. This is what they call "Driverless" and is a in my opinion a very good decision.

3. Upgrades to the firmware must be run from Windows computers. If you don't happen to own a Windows computer, you're out of luck. This is not a very good decision when calling your product MAC compatible.

You might be asking; "So, if the photo-linking software supplied by AMOD does not exist for MAC computers and firmware upgrades only exist for Windows computers, how can they say it is compatible with MAC"?

The device itself is compatible with MACs because it looks like a thumb drive and has a third party software package that comes in the package to link the GPS tacks to photos. More on the third party software later.

I think that the firmware upgrades should be written for all operating systems that it is deemed compatible. For example to be called Macintosh compatible, firmware upgrades should run from a Macintosh computer. Garmin now supports MACs and did not claim to be MAC compatible until they had the support software for Macintosh computers.

To allow Macintosh users to link GPS locations to JPEGs, the AMOD is shipped with a JetPhoto Studio. Out of the box you can use this software to attribute the photographs with the GPS track locations. However I say attribute because the GPS location is not embedded into the JPEG. The location is kept in the JetPhoto photo album and assigned to the photo. What this means is that if you link the GPS location to the photograph in JetPhoto Studio and then send the photo to a friend the GPS location does not go with the photograph, it remains only in the JetPhoto album.

To actually embed the GPS location into the JPEG you must purchase JetPhoto Studio Pro for an additional $25. I was not happy about this, but I saw other features I liked in the Pro version that I like and purchased JetPhoto Studio Pro. I tested embedding the GPS location into my JPEGs and it works fine. But now I must run my photos through JetPhoto and then import them into iPhoto which takes extra time.

The only other thing that I think important is that when I first tried the device it worked, then I did a "Clean Disk" operation and that was the last time it worked. I tried installing the latest firmware, removed the batteries, etc. nothing worked. I made a quick call to Semsons (who sold me the product through Amazon) and they determined it was faulty. They replaced it and the new one has been working fine for the few days I've had it.

In summary; the AMOD AGL3080 will work with a MAC but to get the full features you will need to purchase JetPhoto Studio Pro for an extra $25, or find a shareware program that does GPS photo linking. I gave this 3 stars because firmware upgrades are written only for Windows and MAC users are not fully supported with the software included in the box which forces MAC users to purchase the Pro version of JetPhoto or start searching the web for software.

Quite impressive
I just purchased this device, and was a little worried based on all of the problems other users have reported (but AMOD and Semsons have both said are fixed in the currently shipping devices). It takes a little while to get a cold-start GPS fix (about 45 seconds) and it takes a very long time if you're moving while it's trying to get a fix (just like any GPS device will), so it's best to turn it on about 10-15 minutes before you're heading outside and put it on a window sill or outside so it can figure out where it is and sync up. I carried my Garmin Vista HCx along to check for accuracy. I drove around for a few miles, and headed home. I plugged the AGL3080 into my Mac, and it showed up as an external drive with a file named "GPS_20080301_200336.log". Taking a peek at the file, it's standard NMEA log format. I ran gpsbabel on it using the following command " 1041 gpsbabel -i nmea -f ~/Desktop/GPS_20080301_200336.log -x discard,hdop=10,vdop=10,hdopandvdop,sat=4 -o gpx -F ~/Desktop/out.gpx". This gets rid of any inaccurate logs (no GPS receiver does well with less than 4 satellites in view), just to clean up the log. I have to do this with the GPS files from the Garmin as well, for what it's worth. I used GPSPhotoLinker (mac) to open the log and the three dozen pictures I took with my camera phone (I didn't bother to take my real camera for this test). After looking at the results using Preview (if you click "Info" you can see the picture on Google Maps), and noticed everything was off. After going through the pictures, I realized they were all a few seconds behind. Sure enough, I compared the GPS clock from my Garmin with the clock on my phone, and AT&T was sending me time that's about 40 seconds off. GPSPhotoLinker lets you adjust the offset, so I fixed it there, and re-ran the batch. It was dead on. Seriously dead on. To the foot. Keep in mind the AGL3080 was hanging from my belt loop on my jeans, while I'm sitting in a Jeep Wrangler with steel doors -- so it can't see the sky very easily. I did the same process with the GPX tracks from the Garmin, and the AGL3080 actually turned out to be more accurate than the Garmin. I pulled the tracks into Google Earth (gpsbabel again, using -o kml), and it was dead on the roads. Perfect. Get some 1000mA rechargeable duracell batteries, and you'll get about 20 hours of data (up from the 15 they say you'll get with alkalines). There are a few cons: the thing is bigger than I expected. It's also kind of heavy. But even on the provided strap, you don't notice it hanging on you. I'm planning on buying a small cellphone holster for it to secure it to my belt (the blinking satellite LED caught the attention of some kids, and a holster will hide it) -- because I can definitely see myself destroying it if I leave it hanging 4" below my belt -- I've already sat on it twice. Another con is it has a very shiny front -- it looks great, but I guarantee it will get completely scratched up and scuffed. But who cares -- no one is looking at it. All in all: highly recommended.

New tracking modes allow much longer tracks
As reported in January by Paul Dulaney, the error in the device that caused it to report inaccurate latitude and longitude has been fixed. I find that the positions it records are very accurate.

In addition, while the device still has 128MB of flash memory, it now has six user-selectable tracking modes. The differences between modes have to do with the amount of information recorded (types of NMEA 0183 records), the frequency of position recordings, or both.

The original device recorded a position every second, and would completely fill the memory in 72 hours. Now you can choose between recording every second, every 5 seconds, or every 10 seconds. You can choose to record 5 different types of records, or just "RMC" records; these contain date, time, latitude, and longitude, which is enough for attaching locations to photos. RMC records also contain speed and direction of travel, but not altitude. Altitude is in "GGA" records, which also contain latitude, longitude, and time, but not date. (Who designed this stuff, anyway?)

Recording only RMC records every second, the device can now hold a track that lasts 288 hours. As you might expect, recording every 5 seconds yields 1440 hours, and every 10 seconds yields 2880 hours. Recording more record types takes more space, but recording everything record type it knows about every 10 seconds can be done for 720 hours.

The device remembers the last mode you set, and uses it the next time it powers up. You can just set it and forget it.

I found the recorded altitudes to be very inaccurate -- it claims a difference of 30 meters altitude between the front and back of my yard, while a difference of 1.5 meters is more like it. I understand that GPS devices generally don't do well with altitudes. This is a shame, because a true "geotag" should have three coordinates, to fix a point in 3-space.

I particularly like that fact that the device attaches to a computer as a plain vanilla flash memory drive, a "removable disk". This means that there is no dependency on device drivers or other proprietary software: you just copy the log files from the device to the computer, and do what you want with them. Based on the horror stories in reviews of other GPS loggers' software and drivers, this is a very good thing.

I have not tried the software that comes on the CD. AMOD provides two programs, but one of them is Windows only and thus unusable on my Macintosh. (I haven't needed to run Windows programs yet on my Mac, and I see no need to start now just for this GPS logger.) I wrote a rather simple Python script that matches the times on photos with entries in the GPS log files and updates the photos' GPS data using a free program called ExifTool.

To sum up, the AGL3080 does just what I wanted. It has a very simple user interface: about all you have to do is turn it on and make sure it has fresh batteries. It's easy to read and process the GPS logs that it records. I recommend the device.