GoPro Software – Where the Karma Strikes Back

Although the GoPro Karma didn’t come out on top in our comparison with the Mavic Pro, what we did like was that the Karma is clearly meant to be another cog in the wheel of GoPro’s photography eco-system. Its component parts, namely the camera, the stabilized gimbal and the drone itself, can all be used separately.

Aside from the hardware, as you would expect from a company that’s been dominating the action camera scene for years now, GoPro has plenty of software that drone pilots will find useful. With that in mind, we wanted to take a closer look at the company’s in-flight and post-flight software, which has been designed to bring together the whole photography experience in one easy-to-use package.

GoPro Software In-Flight – Passenger

First up we have GoPro’s Passenger app. It’ll be released later this month, and although we don’t have many details on it yet, it promises to be an exciting feature for Karma pilots. The idea is a pretty simple one. Your friends will be able to download the Passenger app and effectively ride along with your Karma, watching live footage as you fly. But ‘Passenger’ is a little misleading here – ‘Co-Pilot’ might be a better way to describe it. As well as going along for the ride, passengers can take control of the camera and direct the photography from below.

This will obviously be a lot of fun and make flying more of a social experience, but we anticipate that it could come in handy for professional photographers too. Given the Karma’s lack of truly autonomous flight, it’ll probably be tough to get the shots you want without a co-pilot on camera duty, anyway.

GoPro Software – Editing and organizing with Quik

GoPro’s Quik application is the company’s hub for all your footage. With it, your photos and videos can be easily organized, explored, edited and shared. Importing everything from your Karma should be a pretty seamless experience, and then you’re ready to get started. As it says in the video below, GoPro’s focus is all about “telling your story”. To that end, you can use the Quik app to merge all your footage together into montages and clever clips, and the software will do most of the complicated stuff for you, such as syncing your backing track of choice to the video. GoPro Studio can be used along with Quik, which offers more advanced editing features. Quik also is the place to go for updating the software on your GoPro camera.

With GoPro, it’s all about showing off your best footage, so a big draw for many pilots will be how easily Quik makes it to post photos and videos straight to your social media platforms. Quik is available on both desktop and mobile.

GoPro Software – Backup with Plus

GoPro Plus is the company’s cloud storage offering, which can be synced to your Karma to automatically back up and organize all of your footage. Once it’s in the cloud, you can view everything you have captured across a range of devices. As well as being a weight off your shoulders in terms of storage, Plus looks like a neat package that interacts nicely with GoPro’s other applications.

It’s easy to see why the GoPro Karma will be appealing to plenty of photography enthusiasts. Although it might not have the capabilities of the Mavic Pro, it’s certainly backed up by an impressive eco-system of software that promises to be both easy to use and great for sorting, storage and sharing. Find out more about GoPro’s software here.