Photos not attaching to form

Question

I and my field crew have experienced a bug where we take a photo (or multiple, usually) as part of an offline form, but the thumbnail won't appear after hitting "ok," as if the photo was never taken. I've even experienced it where I take a second photo and the first one disappears. Unfortunately I haven't been able to recreate the bug in the office, so I haven't been able to troubleshoot and I haven't found any other posts about this issue. Our workaround so far has been to switch out to the tablet's camera app and use the "Attach" option, but that's a cumbersome workflow, especially for crews who use these forms seldom enough that they may not notice a missing thumbnail as a tipoff that something's awry. We're using a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite if that's relevant. Anyone else experience this issue or have a solve?

Thank you!

ColinLawrence · Answer

The in-app camera was added recently and the benefit is that you do not need to leave the app to take a photo in another app (the default OS camera app); it may not be obvious but this is what happens when you go to take a photo attachment. There can be instances where the OS can kill an app (Field Maps) when it enters the background depending on memory usage and availability and using the in-app camera would avoid these situations. The in-app camera may not have some of the tools that the devices default camera may have so that is a potential drawback if those are needed.

If you notice that Field Maps seems to reset after you take a photo or that you are missing data afterwards it could be the scenario I described above and using the in-app camera would help.

If you are still having issues, i'm curious what happens when you open the feature popup again after submitting, assuming you dont see the thumbnail after initially submitting the feature. Its good to re-open the popup to verify if the attachment was actually added or not.

AYamaguchi_UGRWCD · Answer

Thank you for the tip! I'll give it a try next time I'm in the field; I'll mark your response as the solution if it seems to make my problem go away.

I didn't notice any resetting data, and nothing jumped out at me as missing when I went back to clean up the data from browser, but I guess that doesn't mean I didn't miss something.

All I can find online is that the in-app camera is recommended, but no further explanation. What's the difference between using the OS default camera and the in-app camera?

ColinLawrence · Answer

Hello, there is an in-app camera setting now in the Android version of Field Maps. If you are having issues capturing photos in Field Maps using the default OS camera it is worth a shot trying this out. Its found under the Collection Settings in the Profile in the app.

Did you notice if the app itself was resetting after adding a new photo? Are you losing any edits that are in progress when adding a photo?