I have thousands of trail cam photos, how do I import them into BGL?
You don’t need to import all your photos, you only need to import the date and time stamps. We have created the file to do this for you.
Note: BGL suggests that you do import individual photos on the trail cams for the trophies only.
There are two parts to this. The first is managing the photos on your personal computer. Our process is only a suggestion on how to manage them so that it’s easier for BGL. The second part is the actual importing.
Managing trail cams using folders on your own computer – BGL Suggestion
1. Create a folder on your hard drive that will house all of your trail cams.
2. Within this master folder, you will create and name sub folders for each of your trail cams that are on your BGL camp map. For ease of use, make sure they are named exactly the same.
3. Now you have the framework. Each time you pull a card on a specific trail cam, you will create a sub folder within that trail cam’s folder that will be titled with the date that you are reading the card.
4. Import all the photos for that card into the dated sub folder.
5. Go through every photo and separate all the different photos for each specific animal. I create more subfolders for each animal. For instance, for the folder named “Field Cam” I have a sub folder named “10-21-2013”. Within this folder I have a folder for Whitetail, Turkeys, Coyotes, and Black Bear. I then go through each photo for that date and drag the animals into the correct folder
6. Now I go through each photo and delete any photo that doesn’t have an animal in it.
7. Make sure you keep a separate folder for any Notable animals or “Trophy/Hit List” bucks. These must be imported separately
8. At this point, you should have everything organized and ready to follow the steps for importing the data into BGL.
Note: Once you get used to doing this, you can do it in a matter of minutes
Importing trail cam data to BGL
1. Find the trail camera you wish to import data to and click on the icon
2. On the trail cam pop up window, click on the link for View Activity Info
3. Now click on the link for Import Activity
4. Read the instructions at the top of the screen then click on the text link “Download an executable file (.exe)”
5. This will take you to another site, click on the text link “download the Executable here”
6. Save the file to the folder that you wish to import data from. (If you followed our suggestion, this will be the folder named after the camera you are importing to)
Note: If you have already saved the .exe to a folder, then all you need to do in the future is copy and paste to all the other folders. It takes seconds to do and allows you to put a .exe in every folder
7. Go to the folder that you wish to import data from and click on the .exe file that is saved.
8. A window should pop up, click on RUN. This will take a few seconds and will create a .txt file that is added to the folder. This is used to import the date and time stamps into BGL
9. Go back to the BGL website, make sure you have selected the right trail camera
10. Select the intervals that you wish to import the data from. It’s either 5 or 10 minute intervals. (Not every photo is needed to pattern the movement, this eliminates the consecutive photos of feeding deer)
11. Select the species you wish to enter data for.
12. You may also choose to enter photos for a notable/hit list animal. You must make sure you have kept these photos separate from the general population of photos. Only photos of the notable should be used
13. Click on the Browse button to import the .txt file you created. Browse to the desired folder and click on the .txt file.
14. Click on Save
Note: Since this is a free site, it may take some time to download the weather data. Please be patient. We will be adding a paid service that will allow the import in real time. The date and time stamps will import though, so you can see movement overtime, just not the associated weather.
