My wife and I are volunteers for a chapter of Royal Family Kids Camp, which provides kids that are in or have been in the foster care system a week-long summer camp experience. At the end of the week, each camper gets a photo album of themselves participating in various summer camp experiences. My wife is the lead photographer at our chapter; I am also a photographer in addition to my A/V director duties. One of the biggest problems we have had in the past is keeping track of kids that have already had their picture taken for a particular activity, as well as identifying the camper after the picture has been taken. Foolography’s Entagged provided a potential solution and pathway for us getting more sleep during the week of the camp.
Equipment
My wife and I primarily use a Nikon D850 and a D750 at the camp. We also bring a Nikon D200 (I know, it’s ancient), as well as an Olympus TG-6. We first purchased a N1 for our D850, and then after messing around with it for a while, we ended up purchasing an N2 for our D750 a couple of weeks later. I was originally planning on using Entagged’s Namelist feature exclusively at the camp, but my wife was intrigued by using RFID/NFC. The camp has a strict no cell phone policy for all campers and most volunteers, so she would have preferred to use an external NFC scanner to minimize our own cell phone use. We ended up ordering two Tertium NFC scanners through Foolography to use at camp. Our plan was to place NFC tags in each camper’s name badge, which they are supposed to wear at all times. Unfortunately, due to some sort of firmware issue on the scanners, the Foolography units were having trouble connecting to the scanners when we first got them. Foolography did update their iOS and Android apps right before camp, but my wife and I ended up overnighting some Opticon OPN-2006 scanners as we weren’t sure if the issue with the NFC scanners would be fixed in time. We added Code-128 barcodes to the name badges, and programmed in those barcodes into Namelist as well using the CSV import feature within the apps.
Things Learned
There’s not a ton of documentation on the Entagged (especially when using the RFID features), so I’m hoping this post can educate people interested in the capabilities.
- The RFID feature uses the NFC tag’s serial number (UID) as the code to tag photos. The issue with this for us is how to deal with kids that have lost their name badge and need a replacement. There are tags that allow you to change the UID (such as these, which is what I was planning on using: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0895Y7S3M?ps ... ct_details), but you’ll need a special writer to do so. The UID is just a hexadecimal number, so you can’t exactly program in a kid’s name into the code like you can with Code-128 barcodes.
- MiFare tags (like the one I linked above) can not be scanned by using the iPhone’s built-in NFC scanner. My Android phone could scan these tags natively. If you use an external scanner with the iOS app, you can scan MiFare tags.
- The Opticon scanners make audible noises if the barcode scan is successful or not—super helpful.
- The Opticon scanners are very hard to use outside in the sun, as it’s difficult to see the guide laser (but they will scan outside if you line up things correctly).
- The Opticon scanners constantly needed to be re-paired with the Entagged units if the camera was turned off. They would not re-pair automatically, I had to force the Entagged to forget, and pair once again to get them to sync up. This was pretty annoying in the environment we were working in. Additionally, the Entagged units would actually default to the NFC scanners we weren’t using (I eventually unpaired these after the first day of camp, but that did not fix our Optican re-syncing issue).
- Unfortunately, only our N1 unit on our D850 was really functional. I’ll be working with Foolography on diagnosing the issue with our D750—it was a USB issue. I had seen on another post on the board that if you slightly pull out the USB cable from the Entagged, it will start working. While this was a solution that actually worked for us, it’s not a great solution for the environment we were working in.
- Thankfully, my wife hates using the D850 because it’s too heavy for her—so I got to use the camera with the fully functional Entagged unit. This thing was a total life saver for me at the camp, and I had processed more photos this year than I have ever before. That took a lot of the burden off of my wife, and gave her more time to manually sort her own photos.
- While we were originally hoping to scan name badges to tag photos (either through RFID or barcode), I found that I never really got close enough to a kid in the moment to be able to do so—so I entirely relied on Namelist for all of my tagging. Namelist also allowed me to keep track of kid’s pictures I had already taken, so once I got a shot of a kid doing a certain activity, I could quickly move on.
- If you write anything to the NFC tags, neither the iOS or Android app will be able to scan the tags anymore. The NFC tags must be completely blank. I also had issues with the Android app breaking, and not scanning the tags after a certain point unless I restarted the app.
- It would be awesome for the RFID feature to read a text string off of the NFC chip instead of the UID. This would allow someone to use a more common NFC tag, instead of using the weird MiFare tags I linked above. Additionally, one could code a more human readable code into the tag instead of a hexadecimal UID. Since we were using barcodes at the camp, it was super helpful seeing _CHARLIE_C_ on my camera instead of 00000144 (I had created a coding standard based on sex, age, and a child identifier; this was the best I could do with the UIDs when I was considering using NFC).
- It would be awesome to be able to reorder projects within the Entagged app. You can sort the kids within each project, but the order the app uses for each project is the order they are imported in.
- It would be awesome if you could program the NFC scanner to scan in continuous mode (we had to press a button whenever we wanted to scan), and make a sound based on whether or not the scan was successful or not (like the Opticon scanners can do).
I know it sounds like I might have had a bad experience with Entagged, but our working unit was a total game changer. If we can get our N2 working in tip top shape as well, it’s going to further help our volunteering next year. The photo albums were finished at 11:00 PM Thursday evening—usually they are finished right before the kids go home on Friday morning. We actually got sleep on Thursday evening this year!