A foraging app built around photos

The foraging problem

You are deep in the woods. You spot something good but it is not ready yet — a chicken-of-the-woods that needs another month, a pawpaw not quite ripe, a young chaga conk too small to harvest. You want to come back. You also want to be honest with yourself about the odds of finding the exact tree again. The woods all look the same after the third turn.

Some foragers map their spots with GPX tracks, pin-drop notes, or proprietary “foraging journals” inside other apps. All of these work. None of them are as fast as taking a photo with the Camera you already have open.

The fix that became Photo Find

Photo Find was built originally so a friend and I could get back to a mushroom-foraging spot near Syracuse, NY. The premise is simple: every iPhone photo already carries a GPS fix inside it. Reading that GPS and turning it into a compass arrow is a small amount of code. The result is a navigation aid for any photo on your phone.

You do not have to commit to “tagging” anything. You just take a photo of what you found. The photo is the marker. Later, you open the photo in Photo Find and follow the arrow.

Why this works better than dropped pins for foraging

• You photograph what you saw anyway. A mushroom, a tree base, a berry cluster, a stream bend. The picture is also identification evidence — you can compare it to a field guide later.
• No tagging step. No app to open, no name field to fill, no list to organize. The photo is the data.
• It works on a friend’s photos too. If somebody you forage with sends you a photo of a spot through iMessage at full size, that photo has GPS too. You can navigate to their find.
• It runs offline. No cell service in the woods? Fine. The photo carries the coordinates locally; Photo Find does the math on the device.

What to photograph

• The thing itself. Pull a leaf or a berry or a piece of bark in close. Identification first.
• One step back. The host tree, the patch boundary, what the area looks like.
• A landmark or rock formation within visual reach of the spot, so you can verify when you arrive.

Three photos in 30 seconds. Each one independently navigates you back. The redundancy helps when GPS accuracy under tree cover is bad.

Quick note on GPS under heavy canopy

Phone GPS works best with a clear view of the sky. Under thick canopy, accuracy drops from a few meters to ten or twenty. The compass arrow still gets you to the right small clearing — it just may not point you to the exact stump. The closer landmark photo (item 3 above) is what bridges the last few meters.