Site visit photos

[SJBombero]

Does anyone have a good process or recommended technology for annotating photos taken during the course of a site visit? Or somehow linking them to a notes so you don't have to try to remember where each photo was taken when you get back to the office.

 

[3DDave]

Are we really to this point in technology where a camera does not include an ability to add a voice memo to a picture?

Apple iPhone should have it but doesn't appear to. It can do text to speech on memos, including being able to add memos to particular areas of the photo. Handy I guess for letting the kids touch the area with the bear and having the phone play back "I'm a bear."

The voice memo function is available from Fuji if the

https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-pro2/index.html

is correct.

Perhaps you can take a photo and then a short video of the same to point at things and give a description. Some cameras have the ability to record the GPS coordinates, but that might not work indoors.

 

[phamENG]

Best two that I know of:

1) Samsung Note phone. I can take a picture, then jump to 'screen write' and make notes right on the picture and save the annotated photo as a copy.
2) Bluebeam for iPad. I don't have it (don't have an iPad), but I've seen it in action. Pull up a PDF of the plans, aerial photo, whatever...click the camera button inside bluebeam which brings up the iPad's camera and you snap your picture. Then you drop a photo icon on the PDF and it embeds the photo right there. Go back and look at it on your PC and you can see the picture when you hover/click on the icon. Doesn't work very well on the PC version and, sadly, no Android version.

 

[CWB1]

I just drop images, videos, and occasionally sound recordings into OneNote and add texts notes as needed entirely from my phone.

 

[skeletron]

I always get ads for Company Cam and similar annotation photos. Never used it, but they are aimed at restoration companies and contractors that need to do this on the regular.

I like the idea of using a tablet for the photos, but it seems like a trade-off for amount of time, being in the way, having comprehensive notes, etc.

Videos are great and next level.

I, too, wish that I had a simple app of some sort that takes a picture and allows me to put a caption to it which is brought into a simple report when I upload.

 

[msquared48]

Blue beam works well for me.

Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA, HI)

 

[chris3eb]

For your second question, I've tracked the photo locations using a paper plan. For the first photo, mark a 1 on the plan where you are standing and draw an arrow showing where the camera is facing. Mark a 2 with an arrow for the next photo, so on and so forth. Then you can rename your photos 1, 2, 3, etc. Auto file renaming programs make this last part easy.

 

[EZBuilding]

I recently performed a condition assessment where I annotated issues on plan and used the same numbered tracking system noted by chris3ed. I performed all of this on a Samsung Tablet. Including taking the pictures and annotating the pictures with text and reference directly onto the PDF. Really facilitated the task of compiling information following a site visit as everything was already organized on a single file.

 

[phamENG]

EZ - what app were you using on the tablet?

 

[EZBuilding]

I used the free version of XODO PDF and it did a pretty good job.

 

[phamENG]

Thanks. Just downloaded it to my Note. I'll give it a try.

 

[drawoh]

SJBombero,

If I visited your plant and I took photos, I would store them in the directory...

[pre]2022 05 18 SJBombero[/pre]



--
JHG

 

[DrZoidberWoop]

The Iphone markup function works quite well, depending on the style of photos you're taking. I had a steel job with 50+ locations w/ nonconformances, scattered throughout 10 stories of steel skeleton. I would make my measurements then take a photo, scrawl the piece-mark/location on the photo away from the content, and move on. It was probably the most practical method because some of the locations were over 40+' from the floor below, and when the guy holding your ladder on the steel decking is 60+ years old, you want to be brief.

I would have preferred to use a more professional setup, but accessibility and line-of-sight can be very limiting sometimes. It will be even more interesting once the cellphone companies make dramatic improvements on their photogrammetry, or even LiDAR.

 

[kipfoot]

xodo is the best I've found for marking PDFs on my Samsung galaxy tab (which I bought after a kootk mention in that thread about tablets)

The downside, in my opinion, to using it to place photos directly in the reference pdf is that the photo is not also saved in the gallery. The only copy is in the pdf as far as I can tell.

EZBuilding's comment had me experimenting with this and I also learned about the 'sound tool' feature in xodo to insert voice memos into the pdf. It doesn't seem like you can also listen to these using bluebeam on a desktop, though, and I tend to use the tablet and revu back and forth when marking up PDFs.

(I also use CX File Explorer to access pdfs on my desktop, via my network, using the tablet. I can add redlines while the pdf resides on the desktop drive)

 

[EZBuilding]

Kipfoot - good point about calling out the picture thing. I recall taking the picture with the camera app and then adding it into the PDF. One extra step, but it is nice to have the photo dump later.

I would agree that Bluebeam on PC is an order of magnitude better than anything on android. It would be a dream to have a bluebeam port into android.

I will take a look at CX File Explorer. File Management on Android has improved massively but it still is not as clean as PC.

 

[Brad805]

I would like a script in bluebeam to utilize the "image from camera" for field reviews. This would work well on a surface.

The script would:
1. prompt the user to take the image
2. auto rotate and paste image into a box. rotation would be set with a simple portrait or landscape checkbox.
3. Allow you to crop if needed (this may need to be a secondary user step)
4. create an observation text box that is numbered sequentially
5. Prompt user to type in observation
6. store image based on an automated project criteria using date or some other fields

One could do that with the Javascripting, but sadly I am not much of a coder. I started down the path, but BB tech support does not extend to Javascripting. It turns out there are many similarities between BB and Adobe scripting. Adobe has a very good manual for java scrpt. Life got in the way, so that project went nowhere.

 

[drawoh]

Brad805,

When I download my photos to my hard drive, I do not modify them at all. About fifteen years ago, I stored my portrait mode photos in an archive directory, and I rotated the ones in the main directory. Practically all viewing software automatically does this now, so I don't do that any more. Now, when I pull out my old archive CDs, the software sees they are rotated, and it rotates them again.[ ]

I copy pictures out and I modify the copies. I have a Perl script that copies JPEG files out to 75%[ ]quality. I use this mostly for Facebook uploads. I have written another script that searches down through a directory tree (note my file naming convention above), identifies JPEGS, and it copies them to a slide show directory at 75%[ ]quality. It corrects rotation. It corrects the metadata specifying what the rotation is. It ignores anything smaller than 1000[×]1000. It assigns a random filename. I use this mostly to do ski club slide shows. I am running GNU/Linux, and I have ImageMagick and the magic file. The random numbers mean that the photos are displayed in random order.

--
JHG

 

[RacknRoll]

Ipad allows markup on photos. The markup tool is fairly robust too, and comes with a ruler function as well. Worked well for asbuilts.

 

[EnergyProfessional]

We just started trying out Autodesk Plangrid. I only tried a mockup PDF on my phone (no tablet yet) so far.
But you can take a picture and put it on a part of the PDF. So if you have a floorplan, you can place the image right at what you take the picture off. Later in the office on a PC (via browser) you can see your markups inc. the images you took.

Obviously you have to place the picture manually (it doesn't have an indoor GPS to automatically know where on the plan you are)

 

[wth]

I've started using a handheld 360-action cam for the few site visits I do. It snaps a 360 sphere, with the center focus on the object I photographed.
This allows me to focus on photographing on site, and easily place it on my computer later.