Applying GPS fixes

[max erenberg]

I have been having an issue applying GPS fixes to dives lately. I create the dives from a computer download, sync to cloud. Then when I try to run the “Apply GPS fixes” it seems to just get stuck there and become unresponsive, by that I mean the option “apply GPS fixes” button turns dark but then nothing. I need to close the app and relaunch. I was not able to successfully get it to work. Using IOS mobile app

[Dirk Hohndel]

Support for the GPS feature is being discontinued.

/D

[Stuart Vernon]

Well, dang. That is a bummer.

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[Scott Rummings]

What? This is horrible! Why would you discontinue that? It is a great feature!

[max erenberg]

Thank you for the update. I'm sorry to see it go. Is this GPS functionality in its entirety or just applying fixes? Will it still be psooible to log GPS positions, view the logs and manually add them ?

[Dirk Hohndel]

The GPS functionality in its entirety. 

We'll figure out a way to import GPS data from other sources (maybe, eventually), but the next version of Subsurface-mobile (including the beta that's currently available on Android) no longer access "fine GPS location" and no longer allow tracking the location of the device.

The app stores have made it so incredibly painful to do so - it just wasn't worth it for me.

/D

[Robert C. Helling]

You might be using "GPS functionality" in a stricter sense than the people asking above: When Dirk says "GPS functionality" I guess he means obtaining position information by receiving satellite data on the device. That has been removed since accessing this satellite data has become increasingly difficult for privacy enforcement reasons.

What is still there is that dive sites as stored by Subsurface have geo-coordinates (latitude and longitude) and are displayed as flags on the map. 

At least on the desktop you can still manually enter those coordinates or associate an image to a dive that has geo information in the image (like pictures I take with my phone at the dive site). This is still possible and this is how I get dive site info into Subsurface. This has not been affected.

[Stuart Vernon]

“associate an image to a dive that has geo information in the image”

 

Ooo! I didn’t know about that. So, I can just make sure my camera app has Location Tagging turned on and then just take one picture at each dive site?

 

Once I do that, what are my options for actually getting the geo data from the photo into my log?

 

Can I open Subsurface-mobile on my phone, edit the dive, and attach the picture that is stored on the phone to the dive? And it will automatically pull the location from the photo and apply it to the dive in the log? I don’t see a way to do that in Subsurface-mobile.

 

Can I open Subsurface on my desktop machine and import a batch of photos and have it automatically associate each photo to the related dive, based on the timestamps? And then automatically update the dive’s location with the geo data from the photo?

 

For that matter, since the photos would be on my phone…

 

Can I open Subsurface-mobile and just import a photo (or batch of photos) directly there and have it attach them to the dives in the log based on timestamp? And, of course, update each dive with the geo data from the related photo?

 

What I see, currently, is that I can open Subsurface on my desktop and edit a single dive, then go to the Media tab, right-click, choose “Load media from file(s)” and then choose a photo.

 

I am very happy to learn about this option (which I should have already known about). But, it is somewhat tedious for dealing with cell phone photos. Being able to at least do the same thing from Subsurface-mobile – so I’m doing it on the device where the required photo already lives – would be great!

 

Regardless, I am going to do my best to try and remember to start taking a photo every time I get to a dive site (that I don’t already have #s on), so I can use this going forward.

 

From: 'Robert C. Helling' via Subsurface Divelog <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2021 3:50 PM
To: Subsurface Divelog <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Applying GPS fixes

 

You might be using "GPS functionality" in a stricter sense than the people asking above: When Dirk says "GPS functionality" I guess he means obtaining position information by receiving satellite data on the device. That has been removed since accessing this satellite data has become increasingly difficult for privacy enforcement reasons.

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[Robert C. Helling]

As of now, this is a desktop only version. Select dives on the dive list and right click and pick "load media from file(s)". Select the pictures and based on time stamp they should be matched to dives. If the dives don't have geo coordinates yet, they will get those from the pictures, existing coordinates are not overwritten. 

On mobile, Subsurface has currently no access to pictures stored on the phone. I will look into this but there might also be difficulties due to privacy features preventing apps from arbitrarily accessing photos. So, no promises.

I personally use iCloud which syncs pictures from my phone to my computer in the background. This makes taking pictures on the phone and attaching those to dives in the desktop less painful.

[Stuart Vernon]

Got it.

 

Thank you!

 

I use Dropbox and have things set so when I take pictures on my phone they automatically upload to a folder on Dropbox. But, sometimes it seems like the sync goes to sleep or something and photos don’t get uploaded until I go to look for them, etc..

 

Being able to select a batch of dives and a batch of photos and import all at once is great.

 

Next question would be: I have a dive site in my log named Spar. It has GPS coordinates already stored.

 

Now, I go dive the Spar and also take a photo while I’m anchored at the site.

 

I download the dive from dive computer to Subsurface. And I load the photo.

 

The GPS coordinates from that day might be slightly different from the GPS coordinates stored for the Spar. Mainly due to the fact that the current might be running a different direction, so the boat is anchored to the same spot, but the boat’s actual position is different by 100 feet or more.

 

Will Subsurface figure out from the photo’s location data that the location is the Spar and match the dive to the correct dive site that I already have in my Dive Site list? Or will it create a new dive site, set the dive to that, and now I’ll have a site named Spar and a new site with no name that is only 100(-ish) feet away from the Spar?

 

Now if I can just remember to start taking a photo at each dive site….

 

Thank you again for the info.

 

:D

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[Dirk Hohndel]

So there are a number of options - none of them have been implemented, to the best of my knowledge no one who has worked on the Subsurface-mobile UI is currently looking into working on that.

It /should/ be fairly simple to allow a user to share a picture with the Subsurface-mobile app. I spent a few minutes looking at the interfaces to do that and I believe this is reasonably doable at least on Android.

Let's assume that the time of your phone and the dive computer are in sync - extracting the location from the exif data of the pictures should be simple, so we could apply that to a dive.

Notice the "should"s in that last paragraph.

I don't think it would be much harder to allow this for multiple pictures at the same time. But I haven't thought through the pitfalls (for one thing... timezones... Subsurface very intentionally doesn't try to deal with time zones. All times are "local". So if the pictures are associated with times in different timezones... I don't want to try to work on a system that can deal with that, TBH.

My understanding is that it's much more challenging to get access to a .gpx file - likely we'd have to go through the same idiotic permissions process that made me decide to walk away from allowing Subsurface-mobile to track GPS locations. But I haven't looked into this at all.

Now, to answer your question about "matching dive sites" - Subsurface should show you dive sites that are 'nearby'. This has worked well for me in the past, but I don't think I've tried this on the mobile version... on the desktop you should see the right site pop up. The tricky bit is that unless you have a Garmin Descent or some other GPS enabled dive computer (I don't think we understand any other one), you'll get the dive first and you need to make sure that you import the picture or whatever gives you the GPS data BEFORE you pick the dive site. If you do that, this works well. I have a Garmin Descent and have been extremely happy with that workflow.

/D

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[Willem Ferguson]

On 2021/09/24 00:24, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> So there are a number of options - none of them have been implemented,
> to the best of my knowledge no one who has worked on the
> Subsurface-mobile UI is currently looking into working on that.
>
> It /should/ be fairly simple to allow a user to share a picture with
> the Subsurface-mobile app. I spent a few minutes looking at the
> interfaces to do that and I believe this is reasonably doable at least
> on Android.
> Let's assume that the time of your phone and the dive computer are in
> sync - extracting the location from the exif data of the pictures
> should be simple, so we could apply that to a dive.

I think this is a good idea. My suggestion would be that GPS locations
from a photo do NOT override existing coordinates if the dive site
already has coordinates.

>
> Notice the "should"s in that last paragraph.
>
> I don't think it would be much harder to allow this for multiple
> pictures at the same time. But I haven't thought through the pitfalls
> (for one thing... timezones... Subsurface very intentionally doesn't
> try to deal with time zones. All times are "local". So if the pictures
> are associated with times in different timezones... I don't want to
> try to work on a system that can deal with that, TBH.

Importing from .GPX or importing photos allow a mechanism to subtract or
add time to nullify the effects of time zones.

>
> My understanding is that it's much more challenging to get access to a
> .gpx file - likely we'd have to go through the same idiotic
> permissions process that made me decide to walk away from allowing
> Subsurface-mobile to track GPS locations. But I haven't looked into
> this at all.
>
>
> Now, to answer your question about "matching dive sites" - Subsurface
> should show you dive sites that are 'nearby'. This has worked well for
> me in the past, but I don't think I've tried this on the mobile
> version... on the desktop you should see the right site pop up. The
> tricky bit is that unless you have a Garmin Descent or some other GPS
> enabled dive computer (I don't think we understand any other one),
> you'll get the dive first and you need to make sure that you import
> the picture or whatever gives you the GPS data BEFORE you pick the
> dive site. If you do that, this works well. I have a Garmin Descent
> and have been extremely happy with that workflow.

There are several ways of getting dive coordinates. I personally use a
Garmin Etrex GPS (I have not used the Subsurface GPS facility much
because there are bugs affecting the accuracy of the Galaxy built-in GPS
- at least the version that I have occasionally gives errors > 1 km).
The main point I am making is, please do not make coordinates from
photos the default way of obtaining GPS locations.

Kind regards,

willem



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[Stuart Vernon]

Okay, I did some testing.

 

I happened to have a photo I took with my phone last month when we were getting out after diving the Clark.

 

I had the dive in my log with the site name set, but no coordinates.

 

I loaded the media file, to that dive, and Subsurface updated the dive site (Clark) to have coordinates.

 

So far, so good.

 

Then I deleted the Location from that dive. The Clark was still in my Dive Site list, with 0 dives. I saved my Log.

 

Then I loaded the same media file as before to that dive.

 

The dive Location that was empty got updated to “unnamed dive site” and the GPS coordinates of the Clark.

 

The Clark was still in the Dive Site list.

 

I changed the Location on the dive to the Clark and as I typed a popup appeared that had the first 2 entries as Clark (same GPS fix) and “unnamed dive site” (same GPS fix).

 

So, despite having a dive site with the identical GPS coordinates to what was in the media I loaded, Subsurface did not set the dive Location to that Dive Site.

 

From: subsurfac...@googlegroups.com <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Dirk Hohndel

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[Stuart Vernon]

"My suggestion would be that GPS locations from a photo do NOT override existing coordinates if the dive site already has coordinates."

My suggestion would be to have a checkbox to make that particular behavior optional.

I have a number of dive sites where I manually set the location to the marina or town where the boat left out of. Just so it would display on the map in the right general area. Now that I have learned how to use photo geo data to my advantage, I will be taking pictures at dive sites when I return to them. For those, I would like to be able to load a picture and specifically want it to overwrite the coordinates. That would be easier than having to first go in and edit the individual dive to edit the dive site to delete the old coordinates.

"please do not make coordinates from
photos the default way of obtaining GPS locations."

Are you saying that, when importing a photo (with geo data) to a dive that does not have geo data, you do not want it to set the GPS coordinates from the photo data? Maybe you want a checkbox in the Load media dialog to control that as well?

-----Original Message-----
From: subsurfac...@googlegroups.com <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Willem Ferguson
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2021 7:55 AM
To: subsurfac...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Applying GPS fixes

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[Dirk Hohndel]

On Sep 24, 2021, at 8:18 AM, Stuart Vernon <stu...@force2.net> wrote:

 

So, despite having a dive site with the identical GPS coordinates to what was in the media I loaded, Subsurface did not set the dive Location to that Dive Site.

Correct.

This is not a replacement for picking the dive site. This is a way to add GPS coordinates to the dive site that is set in the dive.

/D

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Sep 24, 2021, at 8:31 AM, Stuart Vernon <stu...@force2.net> wrote:
>
> "My suggestion would be that GPS locations from a photo do NOT override existing coordinates if the dive site already has coordinates."
>
> My suggestion would be to have a checkbox to make that particular behavior optional.

No. If there are GPS coordinates, we don't touch them. We don't override them.
If you want new coordinates, delete the old ones first.
I don't want yet another UI element that serves no real purpose

> I have a number of dive sites where I manually set the location to the marina or town where the boat left out of. Just so it would display on the map in the right general area. Now that I have learned how to use photo geo data to my advantage, I will be taking pictures at dive sites when I return to them. For those, I would like to be able to load a picture and specifically want it to overwrite the coordinates. That would be easier than having to first go in and edit the individual dive to edit the dive site to delete the old coordinates.

I don't see this as a generally useful use case. I see way too much risk that people attach pictures and get undesired effects (e.g., I know two users who take pictures of the dive cert cards of any buddy that's on the dive with them - those pictures may have GPS information and it's unlikely to be the dive site).

> "please do not make coordinates from
> photos the default way of obtaining GPS locations."
>
> Are you saying that, when importing a photo (with geo data) to a dive that does not have geo data, you do not want it to set the GPS coordinates from the photo data? Maybe you want a checkbox in the Load media dialog to control that as well?

No, he's saying "don't drop support for gpx import

There is almost no question for which the answer is "add another checkbox". Our UI is a disaster because we already have way, way, way, WAY too many options... and most of the things they control never get tested (because they were added because one or two people thought this would be useful -- full disclosure, in some instances "those people" included me and I have already started to remove some of those options...

/D

[Stuart Vernon]

Got it. I somewhat misunderstood your previous message on this.

 

I see how it works now.

 

And how it works is fine when importing photos for a single dive.

 

But, if I just downloaded a week of diving from my dive computer (so, no Dive Site set on any of them) and then want to import a batch of pictures from the week, it seems like it would be nice if the software would automatically choose the dive site that is closest (with some parameter for max distance), to save me having to manually go through and do it for each individual dive.

 

However, I realize that is both a “would be nice” as well as a “would probably get used very little, in practice”…

 

From: subsurfac...@googlegroups.com <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Dirk Hohndel
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2021 11:34 AM
To: subsurfac...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Applying GPS fixes

 

 

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[Stuart Vernon]

Understood. Fair enough. I agree, actually.

Once I get through taking pictures at the existing dive sites I have in my list, I would (hopefully) not ever need the option again. Having to manually clean up my existing sites that have "bad" coordinates is reasonable enough to do one time and done.

-----Original Message-----
From: subsurfac...@googlegroups.com <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Dirk Hohndel
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2021 11:38 AM
To: Subsurface Divelog <subsurfac...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Applying GPS fixes

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