Foolography Community

When scanning a high volume of subjects, the Entagged device will scan a barcode with a number for one subject, move onto the next subject, scan a new barcode, take two photos, and then revert back to the previous barcode. It will do this seemingly for no reason and after scanning correctly for a long time. Is there a bug or a fix? Thank you!

Hi
We've never seen this or heard of this issue from any previous customers. It does sound very odd, and to be honest, I can't think of anything in our firmware that might even make this possible. We always overwrite any old barcode data whenever new data comes in, so our firmware doesn't know anything about the last barcode anymore. We also overwrite the data in the camera, which ultimately gets saved in the photos, so I don't see any way that the camera might revert back to the last data either.

Could you send us a couple of the original (unedited) files that show this behaviour to support@foolography.com?

We finally got the set of photos, and investigated.
There was a suspiciously long pause between the two shots when the barcode switched back to the older one.
My theory was that the Photographer probably switched batteries between those two shots.

The thing is that Nikon often does not save any changes you make to the camera settings if you simply pull out the battery - you have to turn off the camera first, then pull out the battery. When you just pull out the battery and reinsert it, I have often noticed that changes to the quality setting are reverted (eg if I changed it from my default jpg to raw, then switch batteries, it's often back on jpeg)
It turns out that the same applies to the comment field - Nikon doesn't immediately save the barcode we set to permanent memory (where it would persist a battery change), but only does so at a certain interval or when turning off the camera. I was able to reproduce that here in the office. As I wrote before, both the Entagged and the app overwrite the old barcode as soon as a new one was correctly read back from the camera, so I could see no way of how the Entagged could have overwritten the code in the camera again. I also verified that the same thing happens when I manually change the comment to be saved in the camera menu, then unplug the battery, and replug it. The same issue happens: the older comment gets saved to the photos I take after the battery change, ie the change I made is reverted.

The long pause would also be very well explained by a battery change, and since my test showed the same result, I hope to have found the explanation for this odd case.

To avoid this issue in the future, your photographers either need to make sure they turn off the camera before switching batteries, and/or scanning the barcode again after a battery change to be safe.