Is GoPro Going to Survive? The Things You Should Consider Before Getting Your Own
The story of how I got to hate GoPro in just 1 year: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I bought my first GoPro in 2019 before embarking on a road trip from Romania, all the way to mainland Europe’s Northern Most point, The North Cape. It seemed like one of those road trips that you won’t forget your entire lifetime, so I wanted to document it all. Hence, it made sense to buy an action camera, and not any action camera, but what I considered the best at that moment, the GoPro Hero 7 Black. For such a journey, one battery is not enough, right? And you’d also need few other accessories. So I ended up with a bag full of GoPro stuff.
When you’re traveling you also don’t want or don’t have enough time to waste on managing your media, downloading it from the memory card to your laptop or some other external storage device. Or perhaps you simply want to travel without such devices with you. Therefore, I went for the GoPro Plus Subscription, with unlimited cloud storage for all your media (plus other perks). Awesome! Or is it?
GoPro - The Good
It’s an Action Camera
Well, this is the best thing compared to using let’s say a phone, and I have to admit that without a GoPro I wouldn’t have been able to take some of the photos and videos that I took. Why? You simply can’t climb a glacier and take photos or record anything with your smartphone or other cameras for that matter.
With the GoPro Plus Subscription, you also have insurance in case you break or lose the camera. Might sound hard for this to happen, but I lost my smartphone while kayaking in Australia (more on why I was using my smartphone and not the GoPro to follow). Wish it was my GoPro instead, even though there’s a tax you have to pay to get a new camera.
To sum up the good aspects of owning a GoPro:
- not afraid to break it or lose it
- easy to free your hands
GoPro — The Bad
Media Quality
The reason why I lost my phone (and found dead) in the Noosa Everglades in Australia is the quality of the photos on the GoPro Hero 7 Black. I always preferred to take shots with my iPhone XS whenever possible because the quality of the photos could not be matched by my GoPro. While I had the GoPro with the Floating Hand Grip accessory with me while kayaking I still took my iPhone out to take a few shots with it as well. I felt like the shots with the GoPro were not enough.
Neither of the photos on the left is edited. They are both the original photos taken with the GoPro Hero 7 Black and with my iPhoneXS before dropping it in the water.
Cloud Upload — Only on Some Networks
Cloud upload was the main reason why I went for the GoPro Plus Subscription, but I ended up buying another memory card as well. You can only connect the GoPro to some networks, more specifically:
Heads Up: Wi-Fi networks that require acceptance of a terms & conditions agreement will not work for Auto Upload.
In other words, if you are in a hotel where you connect using your name and room number, your GoPro will not be able to connect and upload any media. While traveling through 15 countries, most Wi-Fi networks that I encountered didn’t work with the GoPro.
Voice Control — Hit or Miss
While voice control is great sometimes, it can be a pain to use. It will not always respond to your commands, or it might start recording out of the blue when you are simply talking with someone (not even mentioning the word GoPro). As a general rule, you want to have this feature disabled and only enable it when you really need it… if it doesn’t rain.. or if there’s no wind.
Hands-Free — Can’t see what you’re shooting
When you mount your camera on your head or chest, you will be able to see on your phone what the camera “sees” and adjust the angle and the frame. That’s it. Afterward, it’s just wishful thinking that you’re actually shooting what you want to shoot. Yeah, it’s better than nothing, but having a photo with someone without the head is still nothing.
GoPro — The Ugly
Camera Software Sucks
Do you know that moment when you have to grab your camera really quick to take a shot that you’ll otherwise lose? Somehow that is the moment when the camera software freezes. The most annoying thing when you need a camera, and you have one, is not being able to use it. It happened countless times for the camera to freeze and you have to take it out of the accessory you are using (most likely the Mounting Frame), take out the battery, wait for few seconds and then put it back in. To be more precise, sometimes, when attempting to turn off the camera, it beeps accordingly, but the screen will remain on. From this point on you will no longer be able to turn it on or off or use it in any way. Sometimes it works if you hold down the power button for 10 seconds, but not every time.
Original Accessories Might Suck
I only purchased original accessories for my GoPro because I thought they were of high quality. And I do have a lot of them: Dual Battery Charger with Spare Battery, Mini Extension Pole + Tripod, Floating Hand Grip, Head Strap + QuickClip, Chest Mount, and a rubber case.
I find it important to mention that I used the GoPro almost daily in my 2 months road trip to The North Cape, and afterward I used it just for a few days now and then. Summing them up I think they’re around another month, 2 months tops. So in total, you could say that my GoPro Hero 7 Black has been used for 4 months.
- Mini Extension Pole + Tripod — this seemed like a super practical one and probably most GoPro owners have one. Unfortunately, it worked well only when new. After one year (of ownership, less than one year of usage), the extension is useless as it always falls down and I am no longer able to use it.
- Spare Battery — only lasted for 1 year. I have never seen a battery that completely dies after just 1 year. I was shooting the Northern Lights in Iceland this October, the battery in my GoPro went low so I wanted to replace it with my spare battery which was showing green (fully charged) in the Dual Battery Charger. The GoPro wasn’t even turning on with that battery in. Partly because of the cold, but I did manage to turn it on inside and it only had 3%, otherwise known as completely useless. So right now I have one dead Spare Battery and a Dual Battery Charger which I no longer need since I have only one battery that I can charge by plugging the GoPro.
- Mounting Frame* — this comes with the camera itself (assuming that nobody buys a GoPro camera without also buy some accessories — keep this in mind when planning your spendings). I simply hate this one. 1) It is extremely annoying to unclip because my fingers always hurt and sometimes I simply can’t open it. Yes, it’s an action camera and you must be sure that it won’t open, but I believe that better alternatives can be found with a bit of research and some good engineers. 2) The GoPro itself is all scratched at the corners from mounting and unmounting this frame. It’s good to mention that I never used the GoPro without an accessory, therefore the scratch is not caused by any other type of misuse. (*Note: I am only referring to the mounting frame that comes with the GoPro Hero 7 Black which I used. I have no idea if this has changed or not in the newer models.)
Media Editing Sucks — GoPro Studio Discontinued
I’m not a professional in the photography field, but nor is the GoPro a professional camera. I have a strong technical background so I have no problems in using different types of software, but I don’t know and don’t want to know professional photo or video editing or the required software for that matter. However, taking night time-lapses, or editing things like the speed on a time-lapse video should be an easy thing. Perhaps it was, with the GoPro Studio, but since this was discontinued, doing any kind of edits on your GoPro media is a pain-in-the-ass.
The reason for taking time-lapse photos is to: A) use the photos and B) create a video. The expectations are that you have both options available right away and when you export your media you’d be able to export either photos or a video. Instead, for the video, you have to download all the photos from the time-lapse on your phone, install Quik, select each photo in the exact order (photos will be added in the video in the order of selection and not by the time taken 😳) and create the video with the speed Quik sets by default. If you want to speed it up, then you’d better find another software to do that.
Technically speaking it is perfectly doable for example to create a time-lapse from a normal video. This basically means displaying more frames per second or keeping the same number of frames per second and reducing the number of frames the video contains. The same thing applies to speeding up a time-lapse. Again, this was possible with GoPro Studio which is no longer available.
Download Your Media from The Cloud
After so many pain points I have with GoPro, I decided to cancel my GoPro Plus Subscription. First things first: download all the media I have in their cloud. How can I do that? Well, there’s no “download all your data button” or something like that as you would normally assume. You can at most do the following steps (this solution is also offered by the GoPro Community):
- select all the files on a specific day with a click (the most number of files you can select with a single click)
- click on every day you have used the GoPro to take photos and want to download them (hope you have enough time)
- hit the Download button (read below before hitting the Download button so you know what to expect)
- be careful as the download will start for EACH individual file and your browser might get stuck
- also, be careful to check the number of downloaded items to be the same as the number of files you have selected in your GoPro Media Library. I hit Select All for a day in which I had 14 items and it only downloaded 10. So watch out not to lose your photos. I’m doing this on macOS, and I tried different browsers. Having selected only 14 files, I was able to track each download request, and 4 of them got canceled that’s why no download starts for them. There might be multiple technical reasons for this issue, but all of them are related to poor software implementation on the GoPro web application.
What’s even more frustrating is that they imply that you might have done something that deleted the files from your computer: By any chance, have you done changes to your computer’s hard drive or storage that may have caused the GoPro files to be deleted? (not from or through the Quik for desktop application but directly through the computer’s file finder or file storage.
No wonder the GoPro Plus Subscription offers unlimited cloud storage. Since you are not limited by the capacity of your memory card you will tend to take more photos. The more photos you have in their cloud, the harder it will be for you to download them. If you are not able to easily get your media you will postpone the moment you cancel the Subscription. The more money you pay, the more money they make. Don’t forget that when an offer is too good to be true, it always has a catch.
GoPro Filenames on Mobile
Another way to download your media is of course, on your phone, using the GoPro Mobile application. This seems to work better than the web application, meaning that all selected files will be downloaded (if you have enough space). BUT all photos are named GPTempDownload (no).jpeg, e.g.: GPTempDownload (1).jpeg, GPTempDownload (2).jpeg. Apparently, this is their default filename and if you want to change it, as per their recommendation, you can go ahead and change it manually for EACH file.
Support
Their support is based on the community, however a lot of the time I searched for something I only found recent replies and solutions that were no longer available because guess what: GoPro Studio was discontinued. The perfect example is the one mentioned above (speeding up a time-lapse). On this matter you will find the following article from Sep 30, 2019, which is no longer a valid solution: This article describes the process to either speed up or slow down videos/time-lapses in GoPro Studio. I was not able to find any mention on this page regarding the discontinuity of GoPro Studio or an alternative solution.
The other types of support they offer are chat and phone. Today I wanted to reach them with a download problem I was having and I had to choose between: A) Chat — 2 mins waiting time and B) Phone — 19 mins waiting time. I went for the chat and clicked the chat button and got the error: Sorry, all agents are helping other customers right now. Please try again later. So what happened with the 2 minutes waiting time? I was expecting a chat to open where I had to wait for a few minutes until someone is available. If you’re wondering, after several attempts of trying again later I gave up and never chatted with them that day. The next day I gave it another try. The same issue, but after trying again later over and over, a blank empty popup opened.. but nothing happened. I closed that and tried again later. This time it went even one step further: the popup opened and it was not empty. Something was loading, but I still had to check back later.
I don’t understand: if they are overwhelmed by the number of support requests, why don’t they accept emails? I would have happily sent an email and waited for a week to get a reply than trying again later several times a day, each day for a week. But that means they would have more tickets to answer this way. It’s easier to reject them in the first place stating that they are too busy.
My Verdict on GoPro:
This action camera is a nice-to-have sometimes, but most of the time it is a pain-in-the-ass. For me, the hustle I have with it overcomes the benefits it brings. And I have the feeling that I am not the only one in this position: my in-laws forgot a GoPro Hero 4 at my place and never asked for it.
At the moment of writing this, I am still struggling to download all my media from the GoPro Cloud and to contact GoPro Customer Support. The only way to be sure that I don’t lose any files is to select and download fewer files at a time. With more than 2000 files I think I might go insane by the time I finish, but I can’t wait to cancel that subscription.
I wonder how long GoPro will continue to survive. They seem to discontinue most of the important software that they still recommend you to use for different use cases. Their current software is not getting any better. The customer support is terrible: the support channels are limited and most of the time you cannot reach them in any way, and when you do reach them they treat you like crap. They also discontinued their Karma drones. Are they one step away from death?
If you, my reader, own and love a GoPro, please comment and help me with your insights. Unfortunately, so far the only people I know that are excited about GoPro devices are the GoPro employees. Please raise your hand if you like GoPro and you’re not affiliated with GoPro in any way!
Later Edits
I was able to chat with them, but the agent ended the chat in the middle of the conversation. I tried to explain that when selecting multiple files some of them, randomly, will not get downloaded. Even so, the agent kept asking me to send them the exact video that cannot be downloaded. After explaining for the third time that it is not a specific file that doesn’t work, the agent concluded that it is a computer incompatibility and ended the chat out of the blue.
The first suggestion the support agent offered was to try out an article from GoPro, which makes reference to Quik for Desktop, which is discontinued, just like GoPro Studio.
For the download, according to the GoPro support agent, the only option that I have is to select and download each file one by one. For me, this is insane since I didn’t upload them one by one manually. I believe that this way of retrieving my personal data from them doesn’t respect the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but I’ll have to look into it.
I opted to get a copy of the chat by email and I received a single block of text with no newlines, no indentation, just everything on a single continuous line of text that breaks where the screen ends and continues on the next line. All text is black, you can barely see who said what and follow the conversation. I think this is just the GoPro way of doing stuff. If you want to read it, copy it in a text editor and edit it to make it readable.
