When I used the Mission Planner geotag utility before - without a hot shoe - I seem tor recall that it was using CAM messages from the log.
Maybe I have that wrong.
The wiki says that the default message for camera shutter events is a TRIG message. And it says that CAM messages are recorded when a hot shoe signal is detected.
It’s quite possible that I simply misunderstood all this when I was working through it over a year ago.
But if my memory is correct - does the wiki perhaps have the function of TRIG and CAM reversed?
You can evaluate it enabling your LOG_DISARMED parameter and sending some camera commands with the camera feedback connected, and then disconnected and analyzing the log.
It was a long long time ago the last time I used a camera with drones, but from what I remember, the wiki was correct, despite of the log messages convention not being much easy to remember.
It appears that CAM messages are logged with or without the hot-shoe active.
When you do the Mission Planner geo-tag process with a BIN file where the hot-shoe was used, the “pre-process” step where the number of messages and images are compared says that CAM messages have been applied to the images.
At this point, nothing has been added to the EXIF on the images, but supporting files such as the location.csv file get created - with location data.
When doing the final step of applying the geotags, the new “geo-tagged” directory is created, and the GPS location is saved in the EXIF files of those images.
What I can’t tell is if both CAM and TRIG messages are recorded. The GPS location stored in the location.csv file is likely the TRIG captured locations - as it would be more accurate.
For some reason plot.ardupilot.org isn’t cooperating for me. It did display some messages once - not sure why that one time worked.
The messages however are the same ones displayed by MavExplorer - which doesn’t include CAM (or TRIG) messages.
I suspect both CAM and TRIG messages are captured when using a hot-shoe input. The reason I suspect that is because when you Trigger Message, and Pre-process - the output shows CAM messages are used.
The file location.csv does have the geotag data in it - I can only guess it’s using data from CAM messages.
Once you do the GeoTag Images function, the new directory is created with the geotagged version of the image files.
Once I actually fly a real test mission, I should be able to see if there is a difference between the CAM and TRIG geotags by comparing the gps locations in the location.csv file and the gps location in the EXIF of the geotagged images.
I know this is all more than you may be interested in - but I’ve included it here for the benefit of others that might be doing a search on this topic.
