Q3 Geotagging extremely laggy

[Alexander108]

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I just came back from a trip to London where I did a lot of street photography. However I had quite some trouble having GPS / geotagging updates on the camera (white map symbol). It seemed not to update regularly. I sometimes had to wait up to a minute for the map symbol to turn white.

Firmware: 2.0.3
Leica FOTOS - Connectivity: Performance mode
Leica FOTOS on Samsung Android latest version.
App says: Geotagging 
GPS on Phone obviously switched on and app can access GPS.

What can I do to get an experience that I have with my Canon R5 that just updates GPS absolutely reliable?

Thank you.

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[SnapshotGR]

Mine is often 20m behind. I have tried all sorts to make it work closely to the shooting location. Regarding the R5, I thought it had internal GPS?

[Alexander108]

So you are experiencing the same. No, the R5 also relies on the Canon app (like the Ricoh GR on their app) to get the GPS data. 

[jaapv]

GPS can be extremely laggy. It always depends on the visibility of the satellites. In towns that is often impaired by high buildings. I do notice lately that the GPS trackers of my dog and cat are slow and give false readings indoors. Car navigation also is slightly more prone to satellite loss since a couple of years, I find. Maybe there are fewer satellites available for civilian use lately because of military use in these troubled  times. (My own speculation) Small antenna systems like cameras will be more vulnerable. Better to rely on the more sophisticated systems in your phone. 

[Alexander108]

@jaapv While this is generally true it does not explain the results of my Q3. Pictures taken with my Canon R5 clearly show 10 meter differences when walking around in different areas while with the Q3 I get GPS coordinates for several pictures being exactly the same although taken >500m apart. To me it seems that the Leica FOTOS app is just not communicating well with the camera and only updates GPS data infrequently. In street photography this doesn't give you the accuracy I (for my myself) expect. I often see the GPS symbol being an outline instead of filled white, wich means the GPS data is indeed old. 

Is there any trick to force updating GPS besides killing the app, restarting it, and waiting a minute until GPS is updated?

Thank you all.

 

[jaapv]

Yes. Use an app like GPS4camera. 

[Alexander108]

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Thank you. Besides the app is not available for my Samsung (however, there are certainly comparable apps for Android), this means: the promised Geotagging of the €6,000 Leica Q3 is not functioning and I may have to revert back to what I did 5 or more years ago. And it never really worked for me as I often enough forgot to start the app.

I was hoping that I did something wrong and by doing things differently I could get this to work reliably. Given an advice from a different website I just did a full reset of my Q3, deleted the camera from Leica FOTOS, restored my user settings and re-connected the Q3 with the app. Let's hope that this helps. I won't have a lot of opportunity to shoot in the next few weeks but if I find this to work, I will come back here.

If I may state this: this seems to be a rather poor implementation of geotagging by Leica. It does not photographers need and the only way to get proper geotagging seems to be using (awkward) additional tools to add GPS information to the photos after the fact with extra steps meaning extra time and effort. 

[coleica]

6 hours ago, jaapv said:

Yes. Use an app like GPS4camera. 

Yep, I gave up on trying to use Q3 with Foto app.  Laggy and at times unreliable.  

[MrOtts]

I'm having the same issue.  I went out yesterday and walked around for over 2 hours taking pictures with my new Q3 43 and had the FOTOS app running on my iPhone.  It seemed like the GPS was only set when I initially turned on the camera as all photos have the same coordinates.  In addition, I only took 45 pictures and my battery went down by 40%.  I also own a Q2, and have never tried the GPS tagging with it, but 45 pictures would hardly impact my battery at all.

[Le Chef]

On 7/26/2024 at 11:48 AM, jaapv said:

the GPS trackers of my dog and cat are slow and give false readings indoors

The cat and dog see been doing Keirin training to beat GPS. It’s working!

[Photo_Rick]

On 7/26/2024 at 3:26 PM, coleica said:

Yep, I gave up on trying to use Q3 with Foto app.  Laggy and at times unreliable.  

Agreed.  Frankly,. I think Leica has a lot of work to do to make FOTOS functional with the Q3.   The "app" is slow to connect and while in operation is unreliable on my iPhone 15.  Also, the Q3's battery is depleted rapidly ["performance mode" -- required in my experience].  It's a bit of a disappointment and I had expected a bit more from Leica.  Geotagging just makes an already marginal situation worse.  And .... then it will go to sleeeeep --- zzzzzzz. 

Edited October 3, 2024 by Photo_Rick