Solocator - GPS Field Camera

Review by eFreeware

If your job involves photographing things and then proving where those photos were taken, Solocator is built for you. It is a camera app that puts location, direction, altitude and time onto the picture itself, so the evidence travels with the image instead of sitting in a separate file that can be separated from it.

That focus explains the price. This is a paid app rather than a free download, and it carries no advertising. It has been on Google Play since December 2012, with more than 100,000 installs and a 3.6 average from about a thousand ratings.

What appeals to me is the idea of a stamped photo as a self-contained record. A picture of a cracked wall, a completed installation or a damaged roof means little on its own; with coordinates, a bearing and a timestamp burned into the frame, it stands as a document. That is the whole proposition here, and it is a narrow one by design.

What gets stamped onto each photo

The overlay is the core of the app, and it is configurable rather than fixed. You choose which pieces of information to burn into the image: GPS position in latitude and longitude across several formats, together with an accuracy figure, compass bearing, altitude in metric or imperial units, tilt and roll angles, a crosshair, and the local date and time derived from your GPS location. Local time zone and UTC time can be shown as well.

A few of the options are more specialized. There is a building mode that shows cardinal direction, so a photo can be labeled as the north elevation of a building face. The app can also show shorter labels or symbols for direction, position and altitude, which matters if you work in a language or a house style that needs particular characters.

Two of the most useful fields for professional work sit behind the Industry Pack purchase. It covers UTM, UTM Bands, MGRS and street address. If your organization works in MGRS, or if you want a human-readable address on the image rather than raw coordinates, that purchase is effectively part of the cost of the app for you.

The camera itself and how photos are saved

Solocator works with both the rear camera and the front selfie camera, and the overlays are designed for either. Pinch zoom sits alongside the usual self-timer, flash and exposure controls. It does not try to be a full manual camera app, and it does not need to. The camera exists to capture the documentation shot.

The saving behavior is the detail I like most. Each capture autosaves two files: the stamped version with your chosen overlays, and the untouched original with no overlays at all. That gives you a clean image for reports or presentations and a marked one for the record, without having to take the photo twice or edit it afterwards.

A compact view option switches off the compass, building and street modes so only the GPS information bar sits on top of the photo. That is a sensible middle ground for anyone who wants location proof without a screen full of data across the frame.

Finding, sorting and sending the results

Once photos accumulate, the app offers ways to work through them. They can be sorted by time, by location, by distance from where you are now, and by project name if you have the Industry Pack. A map view shows where each photo was taken and which way the camera was facing, and you can navigate to that spot from the map.

Sharing is handled in a few ways. You can send photos one at a time or zipped together via the share sheet. Email is the more interesting route, because the message can carry the Exif metadata, compass direction, GPS position with accuracy, altitude, tilt and roll, capture time, the elevation of a building face in view, and a link to maps so the recipient can navigate to the location themselves. Street address in the email requires the Industry Pack.

Photo data and notes can also be exported or emailed in KML, KMZ or CSV formats, and the developer notes that both the email and export buttons can be customized to match the data you need. For anyone feeding records into a mapping tool or a spreadsheet, that is the difference between a folder of pictures and a usable dataset.

What the Industry Pack adds

The Industry Pack is a one-time in-app purchase, and it is where the project-oriented features live. It adds editable note fields that are stamped onto photos: a project name, which could hold a job or ticket number, a description, and a watermark typically used for a company name or username. Those fields can be edited later, so a mistake in a project name is not permanent.

It also brings batch editing. You can select several photos from the library and change the project name, description and watermark across all of them at once, which is the sort of thing that saves real time when a day's shoot belongs to a single job. Export filenames can be built from a selection of fields too, including project name, description, watermark, street address, date and time, a number and custom text.

Cloud storage is part of this tier as well. Original and stamped photos can autosave to Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive, including SharePoint sites and Teams, and they can be filed automatically into subfolders by date or project name. Photos can also be selected and exported later if you would rather do it in one pass.

GPS refinement and devices without a compass

One feature worth flagging for anyone working indoors is GPS refinement and locking. The developer describes it as useful for people working in and around buildings, where a fix can drift, and it can also be used to lock the position of the asset being photographed. For interior surveys and site inspections, that addresses a common frustration.

The clearest limitation concerns hardware. Since version 2.18, the app has been made accessible on devices that lack a compass, meaning they have no magnetometer. On those phones the compass and some direction features will not work as designed. Move to a device with a compass and those directional features become available. Anyone whose work depends on bearings should check their handset before buying.

The other requirement is the Industry Pack itself. Coordinate formats like UTM and MGRS, street address, the note fields, batch editing, custom filenames and cloud autosave all sit inside that purchase, so the effective cost for professional use is the app price plus that one-time charge.

Who this is built for

Solocator is for people whose photos need to stand up as records. Surveyors, inspectors, utility and construction crews, environmental and agricultural field workers, insurance assessors and government staff are the audience it is built for. If your photos end up in a report, a claim file or a compliance record, the stamped overlay does work that a normal camera app leaves to you.

It also suits someone who needs the location data in a usable form afterwards, not just printed on the image. The KML, KMZ and CSV exports and the cloud autosave point toward teams that archive photos by project and revisit them later.

For casual photography, the app is not competing. It is a documentation tool with a camera attached, and its value scales with how often you have to prove where a picture came from. A 3.6 average from roughly a thousand ratings suggests a tool with a committed professional following rather than a mass-market hit, which is consistent with what it is.

Is it worth the price for field documentation

At 99 cents for the app, with no ads, Solocator is inexpensive to try, and the Industry Pack is a single charge rather than a subscription. For anyone who documents sites regularly, the combination of a stamped photo, a clean original, map tracking and data exports is a coherent package that would be tedious to assemble by hand.

The trade-offs are specific rather than general. Direction features need a device with a compass, and the professional fields that make the app most useful, from MGRS coordinates to street address, note fields and cloud filing, come with the Industry Pack. Budget for both the app and that purchase if you are equipping a team.

My recommendation is for field professionals and small teams who need photographic proof of location, direction and time, and who want that proof to travel with the image and into their records. If you take photos mainly for pleasure, the overlays will be clutter. For the work it was designed around, it looks like a focused tool at a modest price.

What's new in version 2.8.5

- Refined the notes overlay UI and brought back the requested “Clear Text” button in input fields. - The app now remembers your preferred sort order for each field type preset notes. - Improved UI experience when navigating and editing photos within your photo library. - Various bug fixes & metadata improvements.