This was my first year at going "Hardcore" on trail cameras. I give the credit for most of my increase in enthusiasm this year to Art Vandelay and Gutone4me as well as everyone else on here for posting some awesome pics all the time. Although, unlike those two, I only run 4-6 cameras depending on how many are currently working We set our first camera on May 4th and I pulled the last one on November 18th. We don't like to leave them out all winter because of the harsh MN conditions and the fact that we don't live close enough to keep an eye on them for thieves. During that time we got over 16,000 pictures of deer, mostly taken with a Reconyx set to 5 shot burst. I decided that I wanted to analyze the pictures some how so went through each picture and set them into one of five categories per day; Night Doe, Day Doe, Night Buck, Day Buck, Day Big Buck (shooters). Being the first time doing this, I decided to give each category a +1 for each motion, not picture, of a deer in that category. So if I got a 5 shot burst of a doe in daylight that counts as 1 for day doe. I wound give as many categories a +1 for deer present, but not multiples in that category because I didn't want to count how many deer were in each photo. So if a Big buck and a doe were in a pic in daylight, day doe, day buck, and day big buck got a +1. I got all the stats entered but thought that isn't enough. So I googled "Weather History" and found a sight that would give me a delimited text file of 21 different weather patterns (Min, Max, Mean-Temp,Wind,Pressure etc) for the entire year and threw that into excel. I then proceeded to write about 18,000 characters of code in Excel, and what I ended up with is a sheet that gives you two line graphs. One for the type of deer for a certain month selected from a drop down list and another for the weather pattern for that month selected from a drop down list. I think it's pretty cool Next year I may count the number of actual deer in each picture and break it down into fawns does and bucks by age but for this year this is good enough Heres some pictures:
The one thing about trailcams they tell what happened no clue as to what is going to happen in the future. My point is trailcams will never replace experience.
Looks good. Save yourself some time and check out HuntSoft. Does what you did with minimal effort needed https://www.huntsoft.com/login?
I was going to post the same thing. I use Excel way too much at work and don't have time to go through 10,000+ trail cam photos.
Im checking out that sight now but it looks like they restrict you quite a bit and I would still have to sort the pictures to analyze a certain group of deer, writing the code is done now its the easy part
Nice! I just picked up a trail cam this year and have been wondering what metrics to make out of the data. I've sorted the encounters similar to you, but separated AM from PM for deer captured during shooting hours. Looks like you have a lot of deer. If I understand what you did, in this example: 7:00a 5 does = +1 7:15a 1 doe = +1 7:40a 3 does = +1 ...that would give you a score of 3 Day Does, eventhough it was actually 9 deer. So each 'point' is a separate encounter, and you could get frequency of occurance. Do you have a way to identify each camera in the data? What do you do about unknown sex? I have a surprising number of deer butts in my pics, lol! Thanks for sharing.
Don't get me wrong, I love to look at my train cam pics... But having to sort through 16,000 and record the data myself is just too much when there is a service that will do it in a fraction of the time. Moose - Is there a reason you are tracking the specific data, or is it just for fun? When I look at trail cam pics... The only thing I care about is if that deer is showing up during shooting light. If he is... Then I know I need to hunt that stand when I have the correct wind :D. If I have a mature deer showing up during shooting light, the temp/pressure does not matter all that much to me... It's not like I won't hunt that particular stand if the temp isn't close to what the trail cam pic shows, etc.
Yes you are correct with how I broke the data down. Our reconyx takes 5 pics in about 10 seconds so we rarely get a unknown deer. There isn't any way to separate each camera so far that would be cool and the website does it for ya but you only get 50 pics unless you pay and im not gonna pay 70+ bucks to look at my pictures when I can do it for free and buy another camera
I did it mostly to see if I could determine any trends in deer activity. It was a lot of work but now its over and next year I will just have to go through the pics and put numbers into a column which isn't hard. I'm also an Electrical Engineering student so I have taken some programming classes in other languages if that helps
Any analysis is good info to have. It can really pinpoint for him, when to hit the stand. Say he notices big bucks moving in daylight several years in a row starting on a certain day, he can anticipate that, and be more prepared, so he doesn't miss the opportunity.
2 properties 12,000 logs $76 year 4 25,000 $124 unlimited 50,000 $172 Personally I think 12,000 pictures for $8 a month is more than reasonable. I plan on only using nighttime shooters and all day time buck activity starting in August. 12,000 should be plenty.
Have you tried using it? It's pretty rough to download many pics on it at a time. Maybe it's just because it's new to me but I don't care for it. A stand alone software installed on a desktop would be way better.
Like as in taking a long time? I only did like 30 just to try it out and it wasn't bad at all for me.
It will only let me download a maximum of about 12 pics at a time which would probably be fine for someone running under ten cameras/sites. I'm thinking though about the higher accounts with 25K to 50K worth of pics. Where I run upwards of forty cams the prospect of being that limited and slow makes me a little uncomfortable. It might not be too bad starting and keeping up with it weekly but I was trying to take this past years records and do it in reverse and that's not going to happen, lol.
