Life is full of trade-offs. You can have it durable, or cheap; sturdy, or lightweight; easy, or full of features. When it comes to batteries in your trail cameras, you may have to make trade-offs in order to extend battery life. Trent Marsh, SPYPOINT’s editorial manager, explains how to get the battery life you want and still get the images you need.

Tip 1: Decisions Have Consequences.

A huge part of how your trail camera batteries perform depends on what settings you are using, and with cellular cameras even where the camera is placed can make a difference. For every trail camera, there are a few settings that can have a big impact on your battery life: photo burst, photo delay, and photo quality. Let’s dig in a little deeper to understand how they are impacting batteries.

Tip 2: Do You Need to Burst?
Every photo uses some battery capacity. If you use a photo burst, when the camera takes a series of photos on a single detection, it will dramatically drive up your photo count; and during night-time detections, when the camera has to quickly recharge the flash, the battery is taxed even further. Are all those extra photos really giving you more information?

Tip 3: Do You Need Fast Follow-Up?
Like photo burst, photo delay directly impacts the overall photo count. If you have an area where deer linger, like a food plot, feeder, or mineral site, and have the delay set very low, you’re not only getting a lot of pictures, but a lot of pictures of the same deer. This redundancy is putting a lot of images on your card, and taking a toll on your battery, without providing much real value. Unless you really want 38 pictures of that same spike every night.

Tip 4: How Good Do You Need?
Photo quality also has an impact. The larger the image file, the more processing power it takes to manage that file. How good does the picture really need to be to get the information you need? Are you planning to blow your trail camera photos up to poster size to hang above your mantle? Larger files, more processing draw, shorter battery life.

Tip 5: Consider the Weather.
Another thing that is hard on all cameras is weather. Extremely cold temperatures are very hard on battery life, so if you plan to leave your cameras out all winter, and you live in a cold climate, you need to understand the additional strain you are putting on your power supply. Maybe consider an external battery or solar-powered unit.

Tip 6: Good Signal = More Battery.
There are additional factors to consider that can be robbing your battery efficiency. Just as with your cell phone, signal quality can be a huge factor in battery life. The longer a camera has to search for a usable signal, or the weaker the signal is, the longer the camera has to spend transmitting photos. The faster a camera can find a reliable signal, the quicker the photo transmission will be, and less stress will be placed on the battery.

Tip 7: How to Wear a Battery Out.
The number of transmissions you make also plays a major factor in battery life. Requesting photos to be sent at every detection is by far the hardest on batteries, and is why SPYPOINT recommends this setting only if there is an external battery supply connected, or you are using a solar-tech-equipped camera. That said, with a little bit of forethought and planning you can stay out of the woods, and keep your camera going for weeks or months on end.

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