Drones are illegal without prior registration in most tourist destination we can reach with small kids in Europe, some of them just dont allow them at all. They are extremely obnoxious, 1 person recording annoys hundreds of others, pretty selfish behavior. They scare wildlife badly so it ends up dying on cliffs. No love nor respect for that, quite the opposite.

I've had one of smaller DJI ones, but reality was, when looking back, even with simple quick recordings I was annoying to rest of the family since it takes a lot of time to set it up, fly, and put it back again. I've donated it to Ukraine army cca directly when russia started the war, hopefully they did put it into good use.

Make great memories, sure, but do it with respect to others and laws.

I have six drones, an Osmo Pocket 2, Insta360 Go 2, GoPro, etc but I barely use the pocket cameras because the workflow to extract content for day-after story-telling via phone feels quite tedious. If you were only going to ingest footage post-trip and make a piece (as per the YouTube example), then I think it's less painful. A decent phone with good stabilisation can handle that though.

That said, two advantages for the Osmo Pocket:

  - footage is not clogging up your phone storage, which can be particularly annoying if you are often unable to backup to the cloud
  - it is literally pocket-sized, a nice form-factor compared to GoPro, and pretty quick to get out and use.

    > A decent phone with good stabilisation can handle that though.

The Osmo Pocket 3 has much better low light capabilities owning to the built in gimbal compared to even top end phones (a couple of good vids on YT comparing them).

The ability to offload to removable SD is huge, especially when shooting 4k@120fps.

By the time you add a gimbal and external storage (on iPhones, only the highest end phones), that rig is pretty unwieldy!

4K anything adds up, for sure, especially if you can't cope with throwing out lesser clips!

I have a phone gimbal but haven't used it in years, so I don't disagree there.

My hassle beyond the iCloud backups when out of range is that I usually want to upload IG stories as I go, and picking through the Osmo stuff is painful enough that I just don't do it. So, for a brief time, I'd shoot everything twice which kills any personal moments (hiking with the kids, etc). And then I stopped. The Insta360 was even more limiting: smaller card, hard to tell if you were recording or if you'd run out of space, etc.

Drones are one of those things that _should_ be something I dig...but I never seem to pull the trigger because it seems like a big imposition on the other people in the same space experiencing the same things you are. Moab was a great example of that...we're out hiking on the 2nd or 3rd most popular trail and there's the constant wine of a drone _up_there_...you can't see it, but it's there, and somebody thought it was okay to use it.

Youtube/TokTok/Insta folks are similar. I'm at Mesa Verde and this guy is getting cranky because he can't get a picture of the sign, because people have the nerve to actually be there...and those people get to hear him take the 4th take of his intro...."what's up youtube"

I heard a lot of good things about the DJI Osmo and their action camera. I have been reluctant as they require you to install an app to use their products?

No app required; you can bypass the registration of the cameras. Drone is a different story; I think you have to register that (can't remember).

Recent models will brick themselves after a few shots if you don’t do the online registration and activation process.

This may just be me, but having just finished a large family archival project of my own, this sort of video is exactly the sort I wouldn't have included.

The simpler, more candid, more off-the-cuff images and videos were gold. A drone by definition has setup and teardown time and is impossible to ignore for those being photographed.

Ethically, drones also break Kant's universalizability principle.

To each their own I guess.

The setup and teardown for the newer DJI drones is quite miniscule, IMO. Even for the Mini 3 it's no more than 2 minutes to set up. Usually I'll do it while we are just enjoying/taking in a sight. Most of our destinations involve hiking so it works perfectly with a break and some rest.

This shot, for example (00:02:04 mark) really captures the moment my wife and I were standing alone on this massive breakwater in a way that nothing else could: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eixbTpEeVwg&t=124

I don't know how I could otherwise capture the full experience of that moment and place in a photograph or on a handheld video device.

That sounds amazing, but how many places can you actually use it?

Surprisingly many.

If the area has a no drone sign, I won't use it. If it has an active denial in the app, then it can't be used without authorization. I've only run into two of those places while at the south of Taiwan (turns out there were power plants nearby).

But honestly, the drone is best for remote places to begin with, IMO so it tends to work out for my use cases.