Not that this is new – Mergin has been doing this for a bit BUT I finally had the chance to sit down and use it.
I have a client taking pics of houses to feed into the 911 dispatch system. Granted – not easy, not fun, and not his idea but he walked into this and has to see it through. You can easily attach a photo to a record. You can even attach multiple photos per record (through a relation).
Once you get Mergin Maps installed AND you have a field set up as an attachment widget, open the project properties. Go to Mergin Maps.
Set up the photo name format
When you take a photo we have it set up to record the name:
BUT YOU CAN’T VIEW THE IMAGE! Correct – this image ends up in the Computer Aided Dispatch system and isn’t needed by the GIS folk. So they are just taking photos and copying them up to the server. I think he’s hitting about 70 to 100 photos day. Maybe more.
Which does take me back to about a decade ago as I roamed the Caribbean. That was one of the “ideas” we had. “Hey lets take pics of houses”. You talk about an uncomfortable part to the work. I collect some GPS data and take a pic. What we were doing was slow enough that residents saw some random bald guy walking down the street, stop, take a point, and then take a pic. Such a slow process 10 years ago that I finally stopped doing it because it was adding way too long to the data collection. Now with your 256GB phone with 5G it’s literally 1 second. Sync. Photos are waiting for you in the office.
