On previous trips, I’ve carried an old Sony GPS logger that I could sync up with the timestamps on my photos, both for geotagging and just figuring out where all we went (“remember that little backstreet temple where you wanted pictures of the fallen leaves, but those kids kept playing in them?”). Sadly, since the GPS epoch is about to roll over again, and Sony hasn’t supported that device in many years, it’s e-waste now.
The fallback plan was to just snap phone pics whenever I wanted to remember where I’d been, but my new camera can use Bluetooth to pull GPS from my phone, and Sony just replaced the flaky PlayMemories app with one that promises to be a lot more reliable. Incidentally, since this isn’t a serious photo trip, I won’t be taking big lenses or a tripod, just the a6500 body, the 18-105mm f/4 G lens, and a new find, an Eighties-vintage Minolta 100-200mm f/4.5 (with mount adapter). I was considering the big old beer-can 70-210mm f/4, but I’d have ended up leaving it in the hotel a lot; this one is a lot easier to keep with me, and the effective 150-300mm zoom range is perfect for hand-held use. Also, it was under $40 at Green’s Camera World in Monterey, which I visited during my iPhone-replacement woes.
But I still needed to decide how to share map bookmarks with my sister, as mentioned previously. With perfect timing, Trello came to the rescue with their brand new map power-up. I was already doing all our trip planning in Trello boards, so it was pretty easy to add location data.
And since you can always export a Trello board to clean JSON, I was able to trivially generate a matching Google Maps/Earth KML file.
Since this is the first version of their mapping support, there are a few issues. First, it leaks memory like nobody’s business, crashing the app if you try to add too many locations in one session. Second, it only works in the Android/iOS apps at the moment, not the main Trello web site. Third, the search functionality is quite crude, and had a lot of trouble with non-English names; I spent a lot of time trying to outsmart it, and eventually had to give up and manually place about 10% of the pins (basically, switch to Google Maps, look up the location, find something nearby that’s less obscure, search for that in Trello, and then move the marker to the right spot).
The result, however, is a very clear overview of our options every day.
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