Robg

Summary: the Lumix Image App when used for GPS, may be one of the worst pieces of software I have encountered in some time.

Brief background: I recently replaced my broken Lumix DMC-FZ200 with an FZ300, and one of my hopes for the new camera was to be able to easily tag my photos, particularly travel photos, with their geographic locations. Panasonic publishes the Image App to support Lumix camera users for tagging photos with geo locations. So I installed the Image App on my Google Pixel 2. The Image App does other stuff besides logging GPS, but I don't care about those features so will ignore them here.

Using the Image App for GPS logging involves three steps:
1. Synchronizing the time in your camera with the time used by the Image App (this is the GPS time, not the phone time). The time needs to be synchronized so that the time that a picture is taken can be tied to the location that was logged corresponding most closely to that time. The synchronization is done via Wi-Fi between your phone and the FZ300. (Note that for those Lumix cameras that support it, Blue Tooth may be used instead.)
2. Telling the Image App to start logging GPS locations. During the time that locations are being logged, the camera and the phone do not have to be connected via WiFi (or BlueTooth, as applicable).
3. Tagging the photos in the camera with their geo locations. This again requires that your phone and camera be connected via WiFi (or BlueTooth).

The Image App failed horribly for me on both of the first two steps.

On the first step, after syncing the time between the camera and the Image App I noticed that the time in the camera was now incorrect, even if it had previously been set correctly, and that the time was off by exactly one hour. That one hour difference also happens to be the difference between standard time and daylight savings time. Now it's probably the case that GPS satellites, being in space, don't operate on DST, but the software in the Image App runs on earth and should be aware of DST and be able to transform between GPS time and DST. But it can't and as a result one has to take all of their pictures with a time stamp that is an hour off.

Things got worse on the second step, logging geo locations from the GPS satellite. I soon discovered that the Image App stops logging as soon as it is no longer being displayed! The app keeps running in the background, but does no logging until it is again in the foreground and being displayed. This means that there are no log entries for those times where your display might have gone dark to save the battery, or when you use your phone for anything else, like answering a call. Furthermore, to get the app to resume logging, you have to remember after completing your call (or after whatever happened to bring some other app to the foreground) to bring the Image App back to the foreground. Also, because you cannot allow your display to go dark, the phone has to be active to touch all of the time that you are taking pictures. I an just see the butt calls multiplying!

While I might have been willing to use the Image App if the time error were the only problem, the combination of the two problems rendered it unusable for me.

I subsequently installed Geotag Photos Pro and it has met my needs.

One last bit. Upon digging in to the one-hour-off issue I found that Panasonic acknowledged this as an error way back in 2016! They still haven't fixed it, and they still are luring buyers with false promises of GPS support. I believe that this is across the entire Lumix line and not just the FZ300.

Has anyone else been successful at using the Image App for GPS logging with a Lumix camera? Before giving up, I did a lot of digging to see if there was some background setting or battery saving setting on my phone that might be causing the Image App to stop logging when it was not the foreground task, but did not find anything. Maybe someone did?

P.S. Other than the GPS issue, I am very happy with the phone. It is a nice upgrade to the FZ200.