Trouble with Canon GP-E2

Five years ago I bought a piece of kit to add to my camera. Since then it has been a near permanent fixture on whatever digital EOS camera I had at the time. The Canon GP-E2 is a simple GPS transceiver that attaches to your Canon camera on the hot shoe. As long as its battery is charged and you have a clear view of the sky, it will add GPS coordinates, elevation, and compass bearing to the EXIF data of your pictures. The only hard part is making the sure the batteries are charged. I switched to a rechargeable AA and get about a full day on a charge. When I load my pictures into my photo library or use them in Instagram, the geolocation is automatically mapped from the data in the picture. This saves the ‘where was this picture taken’ question.

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Prior to having the GPS, I would take a single picture with my iPhone to mark the location. As long as the camera time was in sync with my phone, I would have a primitive location log. The GPS unit on the camera is much cleaner as all pictures are tagged.

Nowadays, DSLR cameras are starting to hit the market with built-in GPS. At my price point, there’s not yet a Canon camera with that feature. For now, I will continue to use the GPS module. It has worked well for years with out any trouble.

When I got my new Canon RP camera, I immediately took it on a trip and used the GPS module just like I have for years. A week later, I got home and downloaded my pictures to find that none were tagged with location information. I was a little perturbed so I set out to do some troubleshooting to determine the issue. In my investigation I confirmed that the GPS worked normally with an older Canon SL-1. That ruled out a problem with the GPS unit. The problem seemed to be with the camera.

So I used the Canon web site to submit a tech support ticket. Two days later, I got no response other than the initial submission confirmation. With no tracking number, I attempted to contact Canon again via phone. I managed to reach a human. After talking to the representative for a few minutes I did not have any confidence that the rep had ever seen my camera model or even knew what a GPS was. We mutually agreed the call was a waste of time and I was promised a callback that I would never get.

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A couple days later, I received an email response to my initial email contact. This email response was incredibly specific and helpful. It was clear that the email support rep had taken my report and actually tried to verify it. The bottom line was that I needed to check the firmware on my GPS and camera. I didn’t know I could update the firmware on my GPS. I spent the next couple hours updating the firmware on every camera and lens too. With my firmware current, I repeated my tests with different results.

Now the GPS was working for the most part but it lacked the digital compass features. The digital compass is great if you want to pinpoint right where you were standing when you took the picture. One use of this is to document the position of the rising moon. No matter what I tried, I could not get the compass to work. I went back to the email tech support for the fourth time and got this response:

Testing our in-house EOS RP (firmware 1.0.1) and GP-E2 (firmware 2.0.2) the units operated as expected. The GP-E2 was recognized by the camera and when taken outside acquired a GPS signal. The GPS data was then saved to the test images I took, and could be reviewed in the Playback mode when viewing the images (in the detailed settings view). One thing to note when using the GP-E2 with the RP is that the digital compass cannot be used with this camera, and the shooting direction is not recorded. This is noted in the “Precautions When Using GP-E2” at the bottom of page 402 of the camera’s manual HERE. I regret any disappointment this may cause.

William
Technical Support Representative

I guess I should have read the entire manual before contacting support. I checked page 402 and sure enough, there was the admonition. Once I confirmed that the equipment was all working as designed, I switched to annoyance that Canon had effectively removed a feature from my camera. I can only assume that this was done in the interest of saving battery life. The Canon RP is a mirrorless camera and this is just the sort of compromise that would be necessary. As it is I need to have 2-3 batteries to make it through a normal day of shooting that used to just need one. I am understanding and still irked.

Canon does offer two other GPS options. One option is to use your iPhone to provided GPS data. You set up a Bluetooth-LE connection and leave the Canon app running on your phone. In my testing with this configuration, my results were really poor. I didn’t give it too much investigation to get it to work. I could have my privacy settings working against me. The GPS data seemed to work so long as I did not switch to another application on my phone.

The other option is to use the GP-E2 as a stand-alone GPS logger. You can set the logging interval from seconds to minutes using the Mapping Utility on your computer. Then it’s just a matter of turning the GPS to the ‘Log’ position and making sure it is exposed to the sky. I clip it to my bag. It does not have to be connected to the camera. This is nice because it makes the camera look less intrusive. I can take a picture with a ball cap on or use my flash. If you tweak the refresh interval, you can get a AA battery to last all day. When you finally get home, you can use the Canon Map utility to update the EXIF location data on your pictures using the time index as a key. This assumes that your camera time and timezone are set correctly. This does take some additional work but it does accomplish the goal. It has the side effect of creating a trail of where you have been that only lives on your computer and is not transmitted to the cloud.

There are third party options like the Solmeta GMAX-EOS GPS Receiver. I have not tried it with my camera. I do like the LCD display that shows the lat and lon. I’m intrigued that it has a barometer sensor as well.

I’m hoping that the next generation of mid-priced cameras with include GPS. In the mean time, I have a workable solution for my next trip.