I remember my first trail camera: A 0.7 MP Wildview I bought from Walmart for $50 or so. It took pictures that looked like a pastel painting and ran for 2 weeks (maybe) on 4 C batteries.
Oh how technology has advanced. Not only are today’s trail cameras amazing, we now have programs available to analyze each photo. And two of the best companies in the business for analyzing trail cam photos are Hunt Perfect and Deer Lab.
Now, to be perfectly transparent, Hunt Perfect is a partner of Draggin’ Deer Outdoors. However, this evaluation is my honest opinion of each company’s software. I used the same 14 day free trial for each company and the same group of trail cam photos to do this comparison.
Trail Cam Analytics: What do they do?
Deer Lab has been in the business for a few years now, where Hunt Perfect is a new company. Both of their programs does essentially the same thing: correlate your trail cam photos to factors related to deer movement, such as time of day, wind direction, moon phase, etc. Specifically, each program produces the following:
Deer Lab:
- Sightings by camera
- Time of day
- Wind direction
- Wind speed *
- Moon phase
- Heat map
Hunt Perfect:
- Sightings by camera
- Time of day
- Wind direction
- Moon phase
- Weather type (clear, rain, etc) *
- Barometric pressure *
- Heat Map
(Note: The * indicates differences between the two)
For both Hunt Perfect and Deer Lab all this information is displayed via easy-to-read graphs. Here’s a few screen shots from each:
Deer Lab Screen Shots
Hunt Perfect Screen Shots
Setup:
Hunt Perfect and Deer Lab are both pretty easy to setup. For starters, both offer 14 day free trials with no credit card required. LOVE that about each company. Deer lab has a very helpful tutorial to get you started. where as Hunt Perfect has easy-to-follow instructions in their HELP menu (if you need them).
From what I’ve experience, both start with adding a camera. Once you plopped your camera location into the Google Maps-style area, there seems to be a couple different ways to sequence your setup. The main thing to remember when setting up each is:
- Deer Lab builds “Profiles” based on “Tags.” You tag each uploaded picture (or use auto tag, which we’ll get to shortly) and analyze a profile based on a tag.
- Hunt Perfect uses “Hit Lists.” You start a Hit List, then either upload photos directly to that Hit List or tag photos to a specific Hit List.
After playing with each program, they are both equally easy to setup. Once you understand how each program analyzes pictures, the rest is a breeze. You’ll get the hang of both, just try ’em.
So, what differentiates Hunt Perfect and Deer Lab?
What does Deer Lab do well?
One thing that is pretty cool about Deer Lab is the Auto-Tagging feature. I didn’t get to play with this much, nor did I attempt to optimize it…but this feature has the ability to be really powerful. From my understanding, the software has the ability to analyze an image and determine whether a deer, turkey, pig, etc is in the image or not. If you’re analyzing thousands of photos, this could save you TONS of time.
I also like Deer Lab’s photo-by-photo weather breakdown. Click on a photo, then click the weather icon and you’ll see the exact weather data for that exact photo. Very cool if you want to do an in-depth analysis of a target animal.
What does Hunt Perfect do well?
Honestly, my favorite thing about Hunt Perfect is the “Activity” tab. This tab pumps out the raw data for your Hit List. Graphs and charts are nice, but personally I LOVE seeing the raw data of my photos, organized by date, in an easy-to-read chart. Maybe I’m “old school” having done this exact thing using Wunderground Weather, but to me this is GOLD.
Speaking of weather, I also really like that Hunt Perfect gives me a 7 day forecast in my profile. There is current weather, barometric pressure, hourly data, the whole 9 yards. It’s certainly not a “need to have” feature, but this is super convenient when I’m trying to plan a hunt. It’s one site with everything I need.
What separates Hunt Perfect from Deer Lab?
This. I’m just going to leave this right here.
Deer Lab has several plans, but when you compare what Hunt Perfect offers vs. what Deer Lab offers Hunt Perfect is $398 dollars cheaper per year. $398 dollars…that’s a new gun, a new bow, maybe flowers for your wife every week so you’re not in the dog house for hunting all the time. Minus $75 for the Cabela’s eGift Card, you’re still looking at a $323 difference. That is huge. For me personally, money talks, and there is not a single Deer Lab feature that is worth an extra $323-$398 dollars per year. Not even close.
Conclusion
In closing, both of these companies have great programs to analyze your trail camera photos. Hunt Perfect and Deer Lab can each seamlessly take your trail cam photos and instantly turn them into usable information. The big difference is price, and Hunt Perfect is priced right. That’s why I support them.
Start turning your trail cam photos (both new and old) into useful data TODAY. Give Hunt Perfect a try at www.huntperfect.io. This program could be exactly the edge you need to harvest your target animal!
-Matt