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Cataloging Trail Camera Pictures?

M

Maverick1

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 2, 2019
Messages
1,195
Interested to hear how you catalog or inventory the pictures you get from your trail cameras.

Have several trail cameras on private and public land spread over several different counties. Lots of scouting has resulted in many different parcels available to hunt. A good situation! Ending up with hundreds/thousands of pictures from many different locations.
  1. How do you keep track of the areas/deer that you get pictures of? (Store them, delete them, other?)
  2. How do you catalog the properties, pictures, and deer?
  3. Do you only keep records for cameras with daytime buck movement?
  4. Do you try to tie the pictures to the direction the deer are heading?
  5. Do you try to tie the animal movement to the prevailing wind on that particular day?
  6. Do you track this information in an Excel spreadsheet, or other information source?
  7. Do you look at pictures from the previous years to make plans for next season? (For instance, if you get a lot of pictures of nice deer from "cell camera A" on 10/25/2021 and 10/25/2022 - you would probably hunt that location on 10/25/2023, right? How do you manage that information over several months of each hunting season, over several parcels, with several years worth of data/information/knowledge? Or, maybe you don't?)
I have tried a couple of different approaches over the years, would like to hear how others approach the pictures they get on their cameras.

(There are lots of threads on "which camera to buy" or "best cell camera" - but very few threads on what people actually do with all the pictures they get from those cameras! What do you do with the information, how do you use it, where and how do you store the pictures, etc.)
 
I'm afraid I don't do a very good job. I number my cameras and cards so I know where my camera's are and which card goes to which camera. When I check my camera I just swap cards. I go thru the cards and erase most pictures and rename others and leave them on the card. I always used the same cards in the same cameras. That's about it.
 
Over the years I've become more organized with this but most of my efforts are trying to inventory the bucks in a given area. Cell cams make organizing things so much easier with your phone app. I save bucks to my photo images and to my "notes" section on my iphone with information I gather like wind direction that day etc. I typically look up historical wind direction and wind speed from weather underground or on the weather stations NOAA sites itself to confirm the wind direction at the station closest to where the camera(s) are located. With standard cams I organize them first by the season for summer to early fall buck inventory pictures then as season progresses, I catalog them according to the location on each farm or property.
 
I use dropbox to keep all my photos. I have a folder for trail cam pics, a folder under that for each property and a folder under that for each year. I don't divide it up any further than that. Usually I know where on the property the pics are by looking at them. I try to keep all pics of bucks 2.5 years or older, basically as soon as I think they are old enough to start to become recognisable.
 
Not perfect but what I currently do:
-Always have a dongle with me to pull pics from a cam to my phone in case I wanna check activity, pics can then be moved from the cloud to some folder, or reviewed deleted and stored some other time when I copy from the SD to laptop.
-Within a property folder, camera folder is called like “Trailcam 2022 12 Orchard Spot” so I always know the approximate season and date of pics, and they sort by season.
-2 years ago I started logging a lot of it in Excel, and yes this was probably the best trailcam “ah ha” moment I’ve ever had. I logged frickin everything around Christmas, going forward I may just log 2.5 year olds or shooters and that will save a lotta time.
-Here is an example of a 2020 analysis format I came up with, can be filtered to a single buck, and heck yes you do see many repeating patterns year to year.
-This year I’m trying DeerLab and while it does offer additional analysis, for me this chart is still one of the handier things I’ve found for pics.
-I may start deleting almost all does / young bucks pics but haven’t done that yet.
-This place sucks during the rut and is awesome late season if you can get em in daylight, logging helped me realize this.
-Imagine taking this chart and having 2020 above 2021 above 2022 and that’s where things get more interesting.
16FD8D2E-A0E2-4CC7-AD88-BB68A71DFAC9.png
 
neonomad said:
Not perfect but what I currently do:
-Always have a dongle with me to pull pics from a cam to my phone in case I wanna check activity, pics can then be moved from the cloud to some folder, or reviewed deleted and stored some other time when I copy from the SD to laptop.
-Within a property folder, camera folder is called like “Trailcam 2022 12 Orchard Spot” so I always know the approximate season and date of pics, and they sort by season.
-2 years ago I started logging a lot of it in Excel, and yes this was probably the best trailcam “ah ha” moment I’ve ever had. I logged frickin everything around Christmas, going forward I may just log 2.5 year olds or shooters and that will save a lotta time.
-Here is an example of a 2020 analysis format I came up with, can be filtered to a single buck, and heck yes you do see many repeating patterns year to year.
-This year I’m trying DeerLab and while it does offer additional analysis, for me this chart is still one of the handier things I’ve found for pics.
-I may start deleting almost all does / young bucks pics but haven’t done that yet.
-This place sucks during the rut and is awesome late season if you can get em in daylight, logging helped me realize this.
-Imagine taking this chart and having 2020 above 2021 above 2022 and that’s where things get more interesting.
View attachment 78555
Click to expand...
This is good. Thank you.
 
Maverick1 said:
This is good. Thank you.
Click to expand...
Over time I may try to make the Excel file more user friendly, and could share it for other to use. Steve Sherk was on a recent podcast with Exodus where he shares a simpler approach. Somebody might think it’s over analysis but the time I’ve invested is probably the equivalent to one or two sits in the stand and it’s been very useful.
 
neonomad said:
Over time I may try to make the Excel file more user friendly, and could share it for other to use. Steve Sherk was on a recent podcast with Exodus where he shares a simpler approach. Somebody might think it’s over analysis but the time I’ve invested is probably the equivalent to one or two sits in the stand and it’s been very useful.
Click to expand...
Yes, I agree. I am there/heading down this path as well. I already have an excel file with all of my hunting spots on public land. Hyperlinks to parking spots, stand locations, pictures from the stand, preferred wind direction, etc. Just thinking about expanding it to include trail camera information, and deer movement, etc.
 
neonomad said:
Not perfect but what I currently do:
-Always have a dongle with me to pull pics from a cam to my phone in case I wanna check activity, pics can then be moved from the cloud to some folder, or reviewed deleted and stored some other time when I copy from the SD to laptop.
-Within a property folder, camera folder is called like “Trailcam 2022 12 Orchard Spot” so I always know the approximate season and date of pics, and they sort by season.
-2 years ago I started logging a lot of it in Excel, and yes this was probably the best trailcam “ah ha” moment I’ve ever had. I logged frickin everything around Christmas, going forward I may just log 2.5 year olds or shooters and that will save a lotta time.
-Here is an example of a 2020 analysis format I came up with, can be filtered to a single buck, and heck yes you do see many repeating patterns year to year.
-This year I’m trying DeerLab and while it does offer additional analysis, for me this chart is still one of the handier things I’ve found for pics.
-I may start deleting almost all does / young bucks pics but haven’t done that yet.
-This place sucks during the rut and is awesome late season if you can get em in daylight, logging helped me realize this.
-Imagine taking this chart and having 2020 above 2021 above 2022 and that’s where things get more interesting.
View attachment 78555
Click to expand...

I really like the idea of this excel file you posted here. Any chance you’d be willing to share that? We spend a lot of time going through camera pictures and trying to remember which deer were at which camera at what time. This would be very useful. Last season we ran close to 20 cameras and just bought 20 more to get running this next season. ANY help in organizing and analyzing the information would be useful.
 
I try to always have cameras pointing north. They get better pictures due to lighting and more importantly, in every picture movement reads the same. Every location gets its own folder. At the end of the year I reduce photos down to essential ones and take notes on movement patterns from that season.
 
neonomad said:
Over time I may try to make the Excel file more user friendly, and could share it for other to use. Steve Sherk was on a recent podcast with Exodus where he shares a simpler approach. Somebody might think it’s over analysis but the time I’ve invested is probably the equivalent to one or two sits in the stand and it’s been very useful.
Click to expand...

Nice work.

This is exactly what I’d do if I could make myself do it. The only two addition I’d like to make is adding a direction of travel (north south east west), and temperature at time of picture for every entry

Then I’d like to have a gps coordinate for each camera/entry.

The chart you show is all id want in excel, but I’d like to have every entry overlayed onto aerial map as a pin(the icon would be arrow in direction of travel, and color would be green legal shooting time red at night).

Being able to sort and filter entries according to date, time, temperature, direction of travel, and then being able to display those entries selected on a map would be great.


We have a similar program for a totally unrelated topic at work. I’ve been trying to figure out how to convince the fella who wrote it to help me out.
 
@Amccormick @kyler1945 can’t make any promises but hopefully sometime here in the off-season I can clean the file up a bit to make it more user friendly as will share. Good weather and wind data has got to be out there somewhere, but have not been able to find the dataset in an hour of googling… spose could be hand entered if it had to be. Direction can be included in the data entry. Sky’s kinda the limit, but takes time. But even with the shortcomings that summary table is still real helpful and I haven’t yet found a paid service that gives me everything I’d like.
 
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