I often get asked whether GoPro cameras make good travel cameras. Not just for action videos, but for travel snapshots and family photos.
It’s a great question! And yep, you absolutely can. I’ve been doing it for years. But there are some quirks to work around.
GoPro action cameras have a lot going for them that make them an attractive option to throw in the backpack for a travel adventure or use an everyday carry camera.
A GoPro is a small, rugged action camera built primarily for video, but every current model also shoots stills — full-resolution photos, not just frame grabs from footage.
That surprises a lot of people. It’s easy to assume an “action camera” is only for video, but photo mode has been part of GoPros since long before the current lineup, and it’s not just grabbing a frame from a video clip — it’s a dedicated, full-resolution photo capture.
GoPro’s own marketing has gradually moved away from hardcore adventure all the time to a more general audience and touting GoPros’ versatility for all sorts of photography. It makes sense; expanding the target audience beyond thrill seekers gives them access to a much larger market. And it’s something I love to see!
Because not all of us are hurtling down mountain peaks on a snowboard at a million miles per hour or shooting through the air with a wingsuit. Some of us, you know, just want to use our GoPros to take photos of our travels. Or our vacation. Or our kids. Or our pets. Maybe the most adventurous we get is snorkeling on a tropical reef with reef sharks. More than a few of my favorite family photos are ones I’ve taken with GoPros.
The good news? GoPros can be great for all of those things, too. It’s just a matter of playing to their strengths and working with their quirks.
GoPros are small and light, easy to slip in your pocket wherever you’re going. They’re rugged — not quite indestructible, but darn close. And the image quality is remarkably good. To top it all off, they’re very easy to use and almost foolproof in their default settings.
And perhaps the most important thing: they can go just about anywhere. Heading to the beach or hitting the slopes? GoPros can handle water and snow without blinking. They can handle bumps and knocks well by themselves, and even more so if you put them in a protective housing. There’s also a huge range of accessories available for them, some made by GoPro and many more made by aftermarket manufacturers.
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That’s a lot of things going for them.
But there are also downsides. So before you rely exclusively on your GoPro for that once-in-a-lifetime trip, here’s a rundown of what I see as the main pros and cons.
Quick recommendation: GoPro HERO13 Black
I go into much more detail below, but if you’re just looking for a quick recommendation, this is the model I’d recommend: the GoPro HERO13 Black.
It’s still GoPro’s current flagship, but it has actually been out for a longer-than-usual cycle, and the older models are getting harder to find (as are their replacement batteries and chargers).
It also brings some major quality-of-life improvements for travel photographers.
The standout feature for travelers is the new HB-Series Lenses. You can now buy a dedicated Macro lens that actually works for close-ups (solving a long-time GoPro weakness) or an ultra-wide lens for sweeping landscapes. The camera automatically detects which lens is attached and adjusts settings for you. It also finally has a magnetic mounting latch, making it much faster to snap on and off a selfie stick or tripod. And while the low-light performance still isn’t where I’d like it to be, there have been consistent improvements in that area.
I’ve posted some GoPro HERO13 Black sample images separately. And I have specific recommendations for HERO13 Black SD Cards here.
Pros
First, some of the good things about using GoPros as a regular camera.
They’re tiny
They’ll fit in your pocket. So there’s no problem with trying to find space in your luggage or exceeding carry-on limits. And no security guard is going to stop you from using a “professional” camera.
They’re rugged
GoPros are built to go where cameras generally have no business going. Heading on a beach holiday? Sand and water are no problem. Heading to Southeast Asia during monsoon season? GoPros will handle the downpours without breaking a sweat.
I’ve put together some tips for using GoPros in and around water in a separate post.
Point & shoot with automatic nearly everything
The automatic settings aren’t perfect for every situation, but they work surprisingly well across a remarkably broad spectrum of shooting.
And with the night modes and other specialized shooting modes added to recent models, including nighttime and low-light modes.
Basically, it’s very hard to mess up a photo with a GoPro because of the wrong settings. It’s a fixed focus, exposure is calculated automatically, and there’s really not anything to attach or detach.
Immersive wide-angle (and now macro)
The photos that come out of GoPros usually have that distinctive ultra-wide-angle fisheye look. It’s possible to change the settings to a narrower perspective to what’s called Linear, but that’s applying digital processing as it saves the file. The optical lens itself is a fisheye lens.
But wide-angle can be a double-edged sword, and this is one of those instances where you’ll want to play to the camera’s strengths rather than fight them.
That immersive wide-angle look is wonderful for big subjects or if you can get in very, very close to take the shot. It can create a great immersive look that especially suits action shots.
The HERO13 Game Changer: Macro Mode
Previously, GoPros were terrible for close-ups because they couldn’t focus on anything closer than about a foot away. The HERO13 Black changes this with its new Macro Lens Mod (it’s an optional extra, and it’s not rated for underwater use).
When you snap this lens on, the camera automatically switches to Macro mode, letting you get 4x closer than the standard lens. This makes it a surprisingly capable camera for food photography, flowers, or product shots while you travel.
Not just for photos
I’ve been focusing here on photos, in large part because that aspect of them might be less obvious about GoPros and more common when you’re using a regular camera. But if GoPros are known for anything, it’s video.
That doesn’t just mean your usual video clips, either. Here’s an example: I mounted the GoPro on the railing of a ship as we were crashing through the sea ice in the High Arctic to shoot time-lapse.
Cons of GoPros as everyday cameras
GoPros definitely have their good points for using as a travel camera, but there are also some negatives that are worth knowing about before you go all-in on taking it as your only camera.
The battery life isn’t great (but is getting better)
This is a biggie. You’re going to have to think about managing the battery life of your GoPro.
In ideal conditions, you might get a few hours of use if you’re lucky, or maybe a little more. But most of the time, you’ll run out of juice well before a day is out, even with conservative shooting.
HERO13 Battery Update: The HERO13 Black uses a new, higher-capacity Enduro battery (1900mAh) that boasts longer recording times, especially in cold weather. It also has a new magnetic contact charging door (sold separately) that lets you charge while recording without opening the battery door — a huge plus for time-lapses.
Regardless, have a plan in place. Ideally, take a spare battery with you (be sure to get the right one for your model, as HERO13 batteries are unique).
They have mediocre low-light performance
While GoPros have been getting better in this regard with each new model, their low-light performance still isn’t very good.
It’s a tiny sensor in there (1/1.9-inch). While it is slightly taller than the sensors in older GoPros (allowing for that versatile 8:7 aspect ratio), it is physically smaller than the sensors found in recent competitor cameras — the DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro uses a 1/1.3-inch sensor, and DJI’s newer Osmo Action 6 goes even bigger, at 1/1.1-inch. This means low-light performance is still a weak point compared to larger-sensor cameras.
Newer models have a night photo mode that’s mostly about longer shutter times, but the high-ISO performance of GoPros frankly leaves a lot to be desired, and it’s one of my least favorite things about them (followed by battery life). That said, the new Lightroom Classic denoise tool is a game-changer when editing GoPro RAW files, and I’ll post a detailed guide on that soon.
There’s no (real) zoom
It’s a fixed lens, so there’s no zoom. There’s a narrower field of view mode, but that’s not an optical zoom-it’s just cropping the image.
Now, there are exceptions. Some of the more recent models have a digital zoom. For reasons I go into detail about elsewhere, I don’t really regard it as a proper zoom — it’s more like a glorified cropping. It doesn’t give you the same quality or results as a true optical zoom.
Responsiveness: They’re quite sluggish
One of my pet peeves with GoPros is that their controls aren’t as responsive as they could be.
There are two things I mean by that.
One is that the shutter is mechanically spongy. That’s by design, to stop accidental shots, but it means that the shutter pushes back when you try to press it, and it isn’t as precise as on many other cameras.
The other is that the software simply isn’t as quick as it could be. The combination of those two things is like the old shutter lag problem on steroids — they are quite sluggish.
It doesn’t matter much when shooting video, but if you’re trying to take photos of a fleeting moment or something moving, there’s a reasonable chance you might miss the shot. And that’s especially true if you turn the camera off to preserve battery life — they take a long time to turn on.
If you’re wondering whether the HERO13 Black can take photos at all: yes, every current GoPro model shoots full 27-megapixel stills, not just frame grabs pulled from video. It’s easy to assume an “action camera” is video-only, but photo mode has been a core feature since long before the HERO13, and it now includes RAW capture (.gpr files) alongside the JPG.
My workaround is to use burst mode pretty extensively.1
You have some, but not complete, control over settings
The GoPros in the current range offer some control over things like ISO setting, exposure compensation, exposure meter type, and shutter speed. But accessing those options is a real pain compared to most cameras.
If your subject is staying still and you have time to fiddle, great. If not, your best bet is to treat it as a fully automatic camera. The latest models use shooting presets that are handy for quicker access to settings you regularly use, but if you’re used to a mirrorless camera or DSLR, it can take some getting used to the lack of quick exposure controls.
Color balance can be off in difficult lighting
The image quality for GoPros is excellent for brightly lit outdoor shots. That’s the bread-and-butter shot for GoPros.
But in other scenes, the color balance can be a little too cool or just goes a bit haywire. Underwater, for example, GoPros have notoriously unreliable color balance compared to competitors like the DJI Osmo Action cameras.
You can change it in something like Lightroom or Photos, but out of the camera, the color balance doesn’t suit every scene.
If shooting photos, choosing the RAW mode (with .gpr files) gives you more flexibility with adjusting white balance when post-processing. (But you’ll also have very limited options for software that’s compatible with GoPro RAW files!)
GoPro camera vs smartphone
These days, most of us carry a camera around in our pocket in the form of a phone. And the camera functions in them can be very, very good.
As well as ever-improving lenses and low-light performance, they have apps or functions that include time-lapse, burst mode, manual exposure control, and, of course, HD video. And because they are, by definition, connected devices, it is simplicity itself to share the photos even in real-time with friends and family or the wider world on something like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or 500px.
So if smartphones can do all of that, why not just use your smartphone? That’s not a bad option, but taking along a GoPro does add some value.
Where GoPros beat smartphones
They’re rugged. The obvious one is waterproofing and all-around ruggedness. Even without separate protective housings, GoPros can take a beating relative to many other cameras and phones. And even in the most civilized travel, you’re probably going to run into times when water is a factor, most likely from rain, but perhaps it’ll be from the spray of Niagara Falls as you go out on the Maid of the Mist. Or swimming. Or diving. Or boating. Or surfing. And so on.
Newer phones are getting much better about being water resistant, and getting a fully waterproof casing for a smartphone is possible, but it introduces other limitations.
And it’s not just about being waterproof. A GoPro in its housing is much better at dealing with being dropped and knocked than most smartphones and is less paralyzing if it breaks.
Mounting Options. GoPro realized early on that having a camera that could go anywhere wasn’t much good if you couldn’t put it everywhere. So they created an impressive array of mounting options that has since grown exponentially as third-party manufacturers got in on the action. If you can think of somewhere to attach a GoPro, chances are there’s a mounting accessory that will do the trick nicely. The new HERO13 magnetic latch system makes this even better, allowing you to snap the camera between mounts instantly. One thing worth knowing: it isn’t held on by magnetism alone. The magnets just line the camera up; a pair of spring-loaded latches actually lock it in place, and you pinch two release buttons to pop it off. It’s worth doing a quick tug-test after mounting, since a camera that looks seated but isn’t latched is how people lose them. For light-duty mounting on straps, belts, and bag edges, there’s also GoPro’s Magnetic Swivel Clip.
Privacy. This is probably a second-tier issue, but there is virtue in a camera being a camera and nothing else. Stuff can disappear when you’re traveling. You might put it down and leave it on a sidewalk cafe in Rome, or it might be pilfered by a pickpocket in downtown Bangkok. If that happens to a GoPro, you’ve lost a camera and perhaps some photos. If it happens with your phone, you’ve lost your phone, your photos, and your means of communication. And maybe the phone’s new owner now has access to all your email, contacts, and web logins. In short, losing a GoPro can be annoying, but losing a phone can be a major problem.
Where smartphones beat GoPros
GoPros are great, but there are things that smartphones do better.
Sharing. The big area where smartphones trump GoPros is the ability to share your photos quickly and easily. Smartphones are natively connected — that’s why they exist, after all.
The HERO13 Black has improved Wi-Fi speeds (Wi-Fi 6) for faster transfers to your phone, but it really still needs a smartphone as the intermediary, and it’s still not as seamless as sharing a photo or video directly from a smartphone to just about any social media or communication service available.
Battery Life. Even the most basic phone has much better battery life than a GoPro. And it’s not even close — smartphones win hands down.
Editing. You can do basic edits to GoPro footage on a smartphone using the GoPro Quik app, but you’re still using a phone, and there’s a huge range of other video and photo editing apps available on phones (and you can import your GoPro footage into many of them once it’s on your phone).
Tips for using a GoPro as a travel camera
Plan ahead for battery life. Whether that’s taking spare batteries, taking an external battery pack to charge the camera on the go, or adding a long-life battery. Most of the time, you’re going to be away from your hotel room or cabin for more than 2 hours at a time, so if you want the GoPro to be ready to capture that magical moment, it’s going to need some juice left.
Get in close. The wide-angle perspective can be great, but if you’re standing back from your subject, it’s just going to end up a speck in the frame. So get in close and make the most of the immersive perspective that wide-angle provides. Because of the super-deep depth of field of the combination of fisheye lens and fixed aperture, it’s almost impossible to be too close and out of focus.
Set the default to Single Photos or Burst Photos. The default mode is a setting where you can specify what function you want as the default when the camera turns on. I like to set the camera to single photo mode as the default mode, so that when it powers up, it starts in that mode without having to scroll through the options. By doing that, I still have available the QuickCapture option for shooting video right off the bat.
Store it in some kind of case. They might be rugged, but the lenses of both the camera and the housings can still be scratched in the rough-and-tumble of travel, something I’ve learned the hard way. And scratches are bad news for sharp photos. It doesn’t need anything fancy — just something that provides at least some protection in your bag, even if that’s just a cloth pouch.
Take a Combination Self-Stick/Tripod Stand. These lightweight and collapsible options come in very handy in all sorts of settings. And they pack away much small and lighter than regular travel tripods. When I’m shooting in the water, I like to use a trigger grip which I cannibalized from a dome port I have.
There’s a huge variety of grips available, but many of them do much the same thing and are quite inexpensive. Don’t forget to make sure that it either comes with a GoPro mount attached, or you can pick up a tripod mount adapter to convert any standard grip/tripod to work with a GoPro.
Use the Highest Quality Photo Mode. Yes, the files take up a little more space, but it’s not that much in the grand scheme of things, and you won’t end up regretting that you skimped on resolution when you want to blow that once-in-a-lifetime shot up as a print to hang on your wall. Most of the time, I should in RAW. There’s only limited software compatibility with them, and the dynamic range advantages aren’t as pronounced as on some cameras, but I still get more flexibility in editing. An exception is when shooting burst mode; JPG (or Standard) is much quicker and more convenient for that.
Plan Ahead for Backing Up Your Photos. This isn’t specific to GoPros, but it’s pretty easy to fill up a memory card quickly with a GoPro if you’re shooting high-resolution video, although that’s much less of a problem with still images.
There are various strategies to not running out of space, from taking spare memory cards to backing up to a hard drive or the cloud on the go. GoPro now offers a paid subscription service that is designed specifically for this purpose, and that probably makes sense as the first thing to try. While the service works well, there’s no guarantee when traveling that you’ll find reliable and fast wifi that’s up to the task, especially for large batches of burst photos or high-bitrate video.
I use one of these, which has a built-in card reader (although not a native microSD slot), but it’s probably overkill just for a GoPro (I use it for all my travel shoots.) A more cost-effective option for traveling with a GoPro is something like the WD MyPassport Wireless which also gives you the benefit of being able to take your data like movies, files, or music with you just like a regular portable hard drive (it has a built-in SD slot, so you’ll need to take a cartridge adapter as well, but they’re very cheap and come with many microSD cards). Oh, and make sure you get a memory card that’s fast enough to take advantage of all the GoPro’s video modes — here are some recommendations.
- Wifi & GPS. Off. I turn these off unless I’m doing something that specifically needs it. They’re good features, but their downfall is that they chew through battery power.
- Auto Power Off: 5 mins. It’s easy to forget to turn a GoPro off, and it doesn’t take long for the battery to run out. So having it turn off automatically after 5 minutes of not being used helps preserve the battery while also keeping it on long enough to be convenient. It does mean having to wait a few seconds the next time you turn it on, but ultimately that’s better than a dead battery.
- Image Format: RAW (.gpr). The newer Black models have a RAW image format for still photos that has an extension of .gpr. It captures a JPG simultaneously as well, so you still have the convenience of using the JPG if you want, but the RAW version gives you more potential for milking better quality out of the image in post-processing.
- Protune Option / Color: Natural. Current models offer three options here: Vibrant (saturated, more “pop”), Natural (closer to how your eyes see it), and Flat. If you truly want maximum control in post-processing, set it to Flat. Natural gets you part of the way there and looks better right out of the camera. Here are some examples.
- Sharpness: Low. I prefer to apply sharpening in post-processing, and it’s much easier to add sharpening than remove its effects. But unless you plan to add sharpening in post-processing, the High (default) or Medium settings are a better bet. I have a detailed explanation of Protune sharpening options here.
- Protune Option / Exposure Compensation: 0. When shooting with a DSLR or mirrorless, I’ll often underexpose slightly to bring out rich colors. But GoPro sensors can’t capture a particularly wide dynamic range, so there can be limited latitude to recovering shadows or highlights, even when shooting RAW. Aside from some specific situations that have difficult lighting, applying no exposure compensation works very well. (Pro tip: some models have a spot meter or “exposure control” that lets you fine-tune which part of the frame to use for the automatic exposure calculations.)
Charging & compatibility
All GoPros charge with the USB standard (and newer models use USB-C), which makes it very convenient when you’re on the road. You can use a wall charger or portable battery pack, or even a car charger or solar — often anything that you already have on hand to charge your phone or laptop.
My wishlist to make GoPros closer to the perfect travel cameras
Do GoPro’s make for the perfect travel or everyday camera? No, they don’t.
They do offer opportunities most cameras don’t, and you can get some cool photos and footage out of them, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. And newer competitors like the Insta360 Ace Pro 2 frankly do a lot of things better.
Overall, in my own shooting, at least, I’m pretty happy with the overall set of features, and I’m not suggesting that they should mimic everything about a traditional compact waterproof camera. I’d just like for some features and functions to be implemented better. I’d take improvements in these areas over new features I don’t need any day.
- Improved sensor that works better in low light. This would also presumably add better dynamic range. There are limits to what can be done with the tiny sensor used in GoPros — you simply can’t (yet) get the type of performance you get out of a much larger full-frame sensor — but modern smartphones show that better is definitely possible.
- More responsive controls (i.e., faster to turn on or off and take photos).
- Use internal buffer for still photos so you don’t sit around waiting for each photo to write to the memory card before you can take the next one. The DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro takes this even further and adds a significant amount of user-accessible internal storage space in addition to the usual memory card storage.
- Better battery life. I know I tend to harp on the battery life of GoPros, but a dead battery brings things to a grinding halt. And dead batteries are something you run into much more quickly with GoPros than most other cameras.2 But this is also one of those things that is very limited by the physical size of the camera, and I confess I’d be disappointed if the cameras became bigger to accommodate a larger internal battery. And there are, after all, options available to add an external battery.
Of course, the way I want to use GoPros isn’t necessarily how everyone else wants to use them, and it only makes sense that GoPro focuses its efforts on where they see the most viable market — they need to follow the money market.
Wrap up
So can you use a GoPro as an everyday or travel camera? Absolutely!
The trick is to work with its limitations and play to its strengths. If you do that, you’ll end up with some spectacular photos of your adventures, and probably some that there’s no way you could have gotten with a more traditional camera. And as a nice bonus, you can shoot some top-notch video to boot.
It’s especially suited to things like beach holidays, anything involving water sports, and anything adventure-y. It’s also great for holidays with the kids. It’s less suited to urban travel visiting the sites, but it will work for that. They’re generally not very good for going on safari because the wide-angle lens will just leave the wildlife as tiny specks in the frame. Unless you plan to get uncomfortably close to the wildlife, that is…
I’ve gotten in the habit of throwing one in my pocket when I head out, because you never quite know when you might be able to grab something interesting.
I’ll leave you with some more examples I’ve shot over the years with various GoPro models, from around the world.
Notes & References:
- Unlike some previous models which featured “LiveBurst” (a mode that captured 1.5 seconds of images before and after the shutter press), the HERO13 Black does not include a dedicated pre-roll feature for still photos. It does, however, feature HindSight, which is a pre-roll buffer for video that captures up to 30 seconds of footage before you press the shutter button. If catching the exact split-second moment is critical, your best workaround on the HERO13 is to shoot high-resolution video (5.3K) and grab 24.7MP frame grabs from the footage later. And to be clear, if you’re wondering whether a GoPro takes photos at all: yes, every current model, including the HERO13 Black, shoots full-resolution stills, not just frame grabs pulled from video — it’s easy to assume an “action camera” is video-only, but photo mode is a core feature and it now includes RAW capture (.gpr) alongside the JPG. [↩︎]
- To be fair, as well as clear, other small action cams suffer similarly brief battery life — it’s not just GoPros. [↩︎]
