In the quest to take a trophy buck, it’s not uncommon for deer hunters to have a large fleet of. Most people I know run anywhere from 3 to 20 game cameras across their hunting property. With that many trail cameras running at the same time, trying to pattern whitetail movement can quickly become disorganized and unmanageable.

Sifting through dozens of folders filled with mostly empty images trying to find a pattern to deer movement can become a labor-intensive task for even the most organized hunter. Fortunately, several methods have emerged to make the process of culling through and making sense of all those photos a much simpler task.

As always, there is a do it yourself method, using spreadsheets, databases, and custom macros. However, this post is for the less computer savvy hunters, who would rather use web apps or software like W.I.S.E.

To do the dirty work for them. Quick Navigation:. Getting Started First thing, before you go and buy software, or dream up your own personal system for managing game camera photos, there are some tasks you need to take care of to make your life easier. Name and Number Each of Your Trail Cameras Each number and description will help you remember where the photos were taken. Most trail cameras will let you give it a custom name through its internal settings.

This is a great place to put the number and description, as it will show up in the timestamp of each photo. Set the Correct Date and Time Make sure you have the date and time correctly set on each game camera before deploying it the field. Nothing is more confusing than trying to sift through hundreds or thousands of photos with bad timestamps. Get More Memory Make sure you have enough SD memory cards. Ideally, you should have 2 cards for each camera.

This makes it possible to review your most recent photos while keeping your cameras in the field. Go Wireless You can make your life even easier by utilizing. You can get the pictures sent to your phone without needing to visit the camera in person.

Now you can take advantage of online tracking tools even if your camera is out of state. Make a Map I like to print out an aerial photo of my property and put it on the wall next to my computer.

Then I place a sticker or pushpin at each location, and use a pen to draw lines of sight for each camera. This helps me visualize the orientation of my photos and ultimately how the deer are moving on the land. Online Trail Camera Software There are several choices for camera software available. Three of the most popular programs are Big Game Logic, WISE, and DeerLab. Big Game Logic. Pros: Free Online Tool. Cons: Limited Features This is a free that allows you to create aerial maps of your land and then add icons showing the location of your game cameras, tree stands, deer sightings, scrapes, rubs, and any other point of interest you might want.

It has some limitations, and you have to manually add all photos, but it can help you get an idea about deer movements. DeerLab. Pros: Best Looking User Interface, Good Set of Features. Cons: Requires Monthly Subscription, Limits on Numbers of Photos This is a newer entry into the trail camera software world and is an online tool that requires a monthly subscription. You can add your own custom property using aerial photography, and allows you to drop pins for each of your cameras.

Each trail camera pin will have information like brand and model. Lets you upload your photos to that specific trail camera and add tags and other details. Two interesting features of DeerLab is the ability to filter your entire photo library by a wide range of criteria and to view activity patterns for individual trail cameras. WISE Trail Camera Software. Pros: Full set of Features, No Monthly Fee. Cons: Not the Best Looking App Photo: HuntersClub.com WISE gives you all the features of the other programs, minus the monthly fee.

Like the others, you set up your custom property and place the locations of your trail cameras. After that, you can import your photos, add tags, and sync them with historical weather data. After using WISE for a while, you have the power to create custom reports for all the deer on your land and even pattern individual bucks. WISE can even suggest to you which tree stand to hunt based on your historical data and the weather forecast. There is excellent support through the Hunters Club website, even including live chat support during daytime office hours.

Time Tracking Software Mac

WISE is also planning for iOS and Android smartphones to give you the ability to add and review data in the field. Great article, I would encourage you to give HuntForce a shot. I think you will find it checks all the right boxes. Please shoot me an email and I will get you set up with a Pro account as well as give you access to a mature account that has been in use since last Spring to give you an idea of how powerful the analytics are and how much they can have an impact on the success of a season. With thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of photos uploaded, the success stories are steadily rolling in and I’d love for you to see why.

Ryan White HuntForce, Co-Founder. Thanks so much for highlighting DeerLab. Since this article was added I wanted to point out that we have added a number of new features. One in particular is how we pattern bucks as it is very different from all the other services or products out there.

Instead of counting every photo of a buck we automatically group sightings in 15 minute increments. This change has dramatically improved the accuracy of our stats.

Here’s an example. Lets say you have one camera over a food plot that has taken 40 photos of a particular buck in a given week. On another camera, which is situated on a trail, that same buck has shown up 5 time during the same week.

If counting every photo the food plot camera would obviously be the most active camera as you have 40 photos of him. But that’s not the case as all the photos were within a 15 minute period.

DeerLab would count this as one sighting, were the camera on the trail would have 5 sightings. Grouping photos within 15 minute increments changes the stats completely and gives you an accurate way to understand various patterns your deer are making. I invite you to try out DeerLab’s free trial and check it out for yourself.

Ben Moore Neil J. Rubenking The Best Parental Control Apps for Your Phone If you want to keep your kids safe online, parental control software on your desktop is a step in the right direction, but you really need a capable app for phones and tablets too. These are the top performers in our testing. How to Monitor Your Kids' Mobile Devices If you intend to monitor your children's device activity in the modern age, you need a parental control application that works well on mobile platforms, in addition to the desktop.

Motion Tracking Camera Software

Kids can get into all sorts of mischief on their mobile phones (or tablets), either on purpose or by accident. Maybe they just spend too much time every day staring at a screen. After all, for both children and adults. Perhaps your kids are even communicating with dangerous strangers without your knowledge. In any case, a good parental control app can restore your sense of control and help you keep a cautious eye out for anything that can harm them. Be sure to have open and ongoing conversations with your children about the importance of responsible device usage, so they don't immediately scheme to get rid of whatever app you install, or find some clever workarounds.

Parental control apps can help you maintain control in a wide variety of ways. Some of the most common types of monitoring include web content filtering, app blocking, time management, and location tracking. We dive into more detail about these top features (and a few more) below. Keep in mind that some of the products we highlight are mobile-only solutions, meaning that they cannot monitor your child's activities on Macs or PCs.

If these platforms are your greatest concern, make sure to check out our roundup of the. The parental control space is always changing—especially on the mobile side of the equation—so we will be updating this roundup as new entries appear and as others fade away. If you use a parental control app that we did not mention and have strong feelings about it one way or another, be sure to leave a comment on the article below. Your suggestion might make it into the next round of updates. Pricing and Platforms Most parental control apps require you to pay for an annual subscription based on the number of devices you monitor. Prices range anywhere from $10 to $30 for monitoring one or two devices and go all the way up to over $100 in some cases if you want 10 or more licenses. That said, there are some exceptions.

Some services, like Locategy, operate on a freemium model, albeit with some limitations that don't apply to the premium edition. Others, like Kaspersky Safe Kids and Norton Family, do not restrict the number of devices that you can monitor or child accounts that you can set up. Most parental control apps can monitor both on Android and iOS. These mobile apps typically allow you to manage settings and view reports from a phone or tablet itself, though some do not have this capability. The quality of mobile apps can also vary significantly between platforms; stricter design rules on iOS sometimes makes a noticeable difference, as is the case with Locategy. One quick note; parental control software tends to be more powerful on Android than on iOS since Apple locks down app permissions and device access.

Most parental control apps for iPhones require you to install a profile in order for all of the features (especially those related to app management and time restrictions) to function correctly. Which adds an excellent set of monitoring and restriction tools. Apple's built-in (and free) solution is also account-based, meaning that it keeps track of data across all of a child's devices. Apple already included a good range of app-blocking and web-filtering options within the Restrictions section of its main settings app.

Taken together, this means that when iOS 12 is released later this year, Apple will have a native (and near-complete) array of parental monitoring capabilities, which rivals the for-pay offerings of competitors. Web Filtering The hallmark feature of any parental control app is its ability to prevent kids from accessing inappropriate or dangerous websites. The majority of these apps bundle a proprietary browser that makes it easier for the services to manage, track, and control browsing activity. This makes more sense than trying to reverse engineer support for every conceivable mobile browser. As such, most of these apps instruct you to block every other browser or restrict your child from installing any other apps at all. Some parental control utilities don't force your child to use a proprietary browser on iOS devices. Rather, they leverage VPN technology, running internet connections through a local app to enable content filtering.

You'll see the icon when such a utility is active. Note that this doesn't mean the child's connection is secured by a full-scale virtual private network, nor that the device's IP address is masked. Most of these browsers operate similarly in that they block access to websites that fall under banned categories, including all the biggest offenders, such as file sharing, gambling, pornography, and violence. The best examples have no trouble picking up on -encrypted traffic and blocking access to anonymizing proxies. Some apps, such as Net Nanny, let you create custom web-filtering categories, and the vast majority let you add specific rules for custom domains. The quality of web history reporting also varies from service to service.

Qustodio shows previews of the sites your child visits on a timeline and contextual options for setting rules, while FamilyTime Premium does not support web supervision at all. App Blocking and Time Restrictions One area in which most mobile parental control solutions excel is in their ability to prevent children from using selected apps. This can come in handy for parents looking to prevent their kids from using social media apps, messaging services that are difficult to monitor, or browsers that get around the defined web filters. Still, it can be difficult to keep track of every new app that your child installs.

Better yet are those services, such as Boomerang, that automatically block new apps your child installs until you explicitly approve them. App blocking works differently on iOS. You can block access to system apps such as Safari, Camera, and Siri, if you wish. You can also disable the iTunes Store and App Store, and ban in-app purchases. Some parental control apps can ever remove app icons completely from the home screen, so there's no chance your kid can access them. Time restriction is another major feature of parental control apps. Some services, like Norton and FamilyTime, let you specify how many total hours (or minutes) a day your child can spend on any given device as well as a schedule for when it is ok to use it.

Net Nanny takes a slightly different approach and applies these time limits to internet usage. Still others, such as Qustodio, offers a mix; you can set up usage schedules for specific apps and device usage, as well as specifying a total time allotment for your child that applies across every piece of hardware they use to access the internet. Track Your Kids' Locations A mobile parental control app should at the very least be able to keep track of a child's current location and some historical location data, too. It's also important for them to offer some level of control over notifications and the frequency of location reporting, to avoid bombarding the parent with useless data. Both Qustodio and Norton Family offer these features. Some services, including Locategy, Boomerang, and FamilyTime, go one step further, letting you construct geofences around a location. For the uninitiated, geofences are digital boundaries around a physical location that help parents keep track of when a child arrives at or leaves a given location.

Kaspersky Safe Kids even lets you add a dimension of time to a geofence, so you can easily make sure a child stays where they are supposed to be throughout the day. Boomerang offers a unique feature, in that you can draw custom geofences on a map; others just create a circular radius around a point you define. Communication and Extras The best parental control applications let you record and monitor who your child communicates with and what they talk about in said conversations. Keep in mind that this capability is almost exclusively limited to Android.

The implementation of this feature varies from service to service, of course. FamilyTime Premium, for example, copies a child's entire SMS history and call log for parents to review. Norton and Boomerang take a less invasive approach and let you specify which conversations to monitor and log. Still others, like Locategy, only display the phone's call log. The best parental control software also lets you manage your child's social media activity, though in most cases this is limited to Facebook. Net Nanny used to offer a service dedicated to tracking social media accounts, but it is no longer available at the time of this writing. One last feature worth mentioning is an SOS button.

When a child presses this button, it sends out an alert to the parent and any other trusted contacts. The notification includes time and location information and will (in some cases) keep broadcasting said data until either the child deactivates the alarm or the parent disables it from their own account. This works regardless of platform and even if a child has run out of their allotted time. Parents who are worried about always being reachable to their kids in case of emergencies should consider Qustodio and Locategy for this reason. Keep in Touch With Your Kids Although the range of features that parental control software supports is impressive, no system is perfect.

If your children want to get around the limitations you impose, they will likely be able to do so either by using unmonitored devices or finding ways to wipe their devices clean of the controlling apps. Thus, it's worthwhile to take the time to talk with your child about why you have installed monitoring software in the first place. After all, digital safety and security are worthwhile topics for everyone. It's better to approach these conversations honestly, rather than have them find out on their own and stop trusting you. Especially for older children, it's also important to listen to your child's specific privacy concerns, rather than just setting rules and restrictions that may otherwise be seen as arbitrary.

Pros: Affordable. No limit on devices or child profiles.

Flexible control of device and app usage. Robust web filtering. Extensive alert system. Cons: Several iOS limitations. Content filtering limited to specific browsers.

Social monitoring only covers Facebook and VK. Sluggish web interface. Bottom Line: Kaspersky Safe Kids is a full-featured, affordable parental monitoring system for desktop and mobile platforms that doesn't impose limits on the number of devices you can monitor.

Pros: Affordable. Excellent web dashboard. Settings apply across all devices. No limit on number of PC, phones, tablets, or children protected. Tracks child's location. Cons: Does not work on Macs.

No Free version anymore. Does not block HTTPS sites on unsupported browsers.

Web extension is easily disabled. Platform-dependent features.

Lackluster social media tracking. Bottom Line: Norton Family's top-notch web interface and wealth of features make it easy for parents to track and manage their children's activity across their many devices, though it doesn't work on Macs. Pros: Excellent iOS app design. Accurate and well-implemented location tracking. App blocking and usage schedules.

Free version available. Cons: No support for Macs and PCs. Lacks call and SMS blocking. No social media monitoring.

Web filtering only works on specific browsers. Bottom Line: Locategy's parental control app for Android and iOS keeps track of your kid's activities and location, but some design elements could use a refresh and the web filtering capabilities only work with a few browsers.

Pros: Easy install and setup. SOS and Pick Me Up options for child. Call and SMS logging on Android. Supports geofencing. Cons: Expensive.

Cannot monitor Macs or PCs. No web content filtering. Easily uninstalled. Not all features work as expected. Inconsistent features across platforms.

Bottom Line: FamilyTime Premium does a decent job of keeping track of your kids' locations on Android and iOS, but it's a mobile-only parental control solution, and its lack of web filtering and inconsistent performance are serious shortcomings.