Best practices for survey123 photo storage

AaronManuel2

I'm interested in hearing how everyone is storing their photos captured through survey123. The way arcgis online stores them as attachments works great when viewing them on the arcgis online platform. But it makes it difficult to use them in other ways.

E.g., we have google drive, and I can put links to google drive photos in fields on features in SDE. Whether a user is a looking at the feature in arcmap or in a webmap, they can click on a link to open the photo. There doesn't seem to be a way to do something like this with survey123 photos.

The other 2 issues are, #1 - a project with 100s of surveys each with a few pictures can eat up a huge amount of arcgis online space. #2 - there is no real way to organize the photos, they are all attached to individual points.

So I'm curious what other people are doing. Are you leaving your photos on AGOL? Do you have a workflow for migrating them to some other platform? 

Thanks.

 

dougbrowning

I agree having them in AGOL is causing all kinds of space issues.  By the time the service is 10-15 GB we have a lot of trouble getting it to export.

We run on field seasons so my workflow may be different but it may help.  At the end of the summer I download the service and import the records into SDE.  I run a python script that extracts the photos from the downloaded GDB using a field from the form to rename the photos to something meaningful.  The script creates a directory for each PointID on the network.  We use IIS to web enable that directory.  Then in my features I have a PhotoLink field that uses the set format http:/something.com/PointID.  We like this also for exporting to Excel.  All the photolinks come with and they all still work.

Then to get a little fancier I wrote a simple script that creates a index.html page of all the photos in that directory.  That way users do not have to click on each photo.  I then got even fancier and write any comments into the Exif info of the photo.  I use this in the HTML page so you can see the photo comments right there.

Example of screen shot (all photos are the same just as a test)

 

This is a little more advanced but the script was pretty easy.  With scripts I am able to extract, rename, folder, and create HTML for 8,000 photos in around 10 minutes.

This may not be for you but it works great for us.  Good luck