For a point-and-shoot travel camera, what features matter the most?

Question

For a GPS-enabled point-and-shoot camera mainly to be used when traveling and hiking, what specific features or criteria can be used to narrow the field of possible cameras?

Ideally this camera would also be good for capturing everyday outings.

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Original Question:

I'm a noob photographer who needs the camera mainly for snapshots. Particularly there are three opportunities when I take pictures, ordered by priority:

1. Taking pictures while traveling. There I want to make pictures of sights, but also landscape or persons
2. Taking pictures when hiking, both in the summer and during winter.
3. Taking pictures when going out and having fun

So as you can see these are three very different kind of pictures. Additionally, I have some further requirements. It is absolutely necessary that the camera supports automatic geo-tagging with GPS and it should not be too heavy since I'm carrying it even when doing sports.

Based on these features (not too big, geo-tagging), I have selected all possible cameras on www.digitec.ch. The problem now is that there are almost 100 possible candidates. So what additional criteria can I use to choose a camera?

Answer

For a camera that's going to be used during hiking and sporting, drop and weather resistance might be beneficial. You can find those cameras by selecting the "Waterproof" options.

"Going out and having fun" suggests looking for good light gathering ability for better quality of low-light shots and faster shutter speeds in action shots. This is usually achieved through larger sensor size and lenses with smaller f-number. Unfortunately there are no search options on Digitec for such info; you might have to skim some reviews and look for "low light performance", "high ISO handling" or something similar.

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