Haha. No apology needed. Just keep posting pictures everybody.
Yeah, step 1, turn off the GPS settings on your phone’s camera. That’s an easy one. If enabled, the exact spot of the photo’s location (and therefore the individual fish itself), +/- about 40 feet, can be deciphered by even 101 level photo sleuths with a couple clicks, and a copy and paste of the coordinates into any free online mapping software. Google Maps works just fine.
I usually don’t go there as a matter of first course, just because it’s too easy, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure things out based on the context clues and photos. Once I think I have it, I’ll use the GPS coordinates to confirm I’m right, if they are available. Good Winterime pastime I’ve found.
If it’s in PA, and there’s a description and photos in a post, I’m pretty confident I could get most of them without the GPS tags. Or if not, I’m nearly certain I could get the general area, if not the specific stream. Yeah, just a random fish photo with no background and no context is tougher, but still can be done. Some watersheds have some unique genetic characteristics in the fish that can help point you in the right direction, but that’s just a clue to factor in, not a giveaway.
There are no GPS coordinates on YouTube videos, but I have been able to sleuth most of the streams, even the small ones, on most of the popular PA YT FFing channels…Allegheny Native/Lively Legz/WildBlueDiscovery/Hardway Outdoors/Suffering Outdoors/SC Outdoors/Everyday Outdoorsmen/Traveling Trout Co/Wooly Bugged/etc. None of these channels generally name where they are fishing, unless it’s a very large, popular stream that is fairly obvious anyway, but I can say that there isn’t a single PA YT video that I have not been able to figure out, if I was motivated enough by what I saw to give it enough time and effort.
Just a combination of experience with the way different landscapes and geologies across the state look and appear, context clues from the audio of the creator, and actual video footage of the stream and surroundings cross referenced with satellite mapping, and street level mapping if the stream is along a road, or there are any driving scenes cut into the video. It’s not THAT difficult, but it does take time, and you have to have a general know how of PA wild Trout habitats, and what streams and the woods in certain areas of the state look like. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Sometimes I’d only be able to narrow it down to a certain area. A certain Wooly Bugged video comes to mind where I narrowed it down to somewhere on public land in Sullivan County. I had a pretty good idea it was one of 3 or 4 streams. So I went and fished them over the course of about a month. It was fun. Found it on the third stream I tried. (And found two other good ones in the process as a bonus.) So it does take some field effort too sometimes.
To the OP on this one, I knew where you were by the end of the second sentence. I think a lot of guys familiar with that area probably did. Which is fine. I’ve always gone by the idea that if the OP chose to not name a stream in his OP, I assume he did so on purpose, and IMO it is a significant breach of etiquette for someone to come in later in the thread who recognized it, and named it, even if it was a fairly obvious one as was the case here. If the OP names where he is/was, then it’s fair game IMO. I do think that was in poor form here in this specific thread, even if it made little practical difference as I think everyone participating in the discussion knew what stream was being talked about.
Edit: I may enable GPS on my phone’s camera again, and then manually edit the GPS data before posting any pictures. That would be next level fun.
I think many of you know, and those who have fished with me definitely know, I’m not that great in terms of technical FFing skills. I think I can hold my own when it comes to deciding on where to try to catch fish though.
