ArcGIS FieldMaps using Android (Samsung) phone, photo attachments disappear after submitting data - can they be recovered?

FintanSweeney2

We carried out an inspection using ArcGIS FieldMaps recently. There were five people doing the inspection - four were using iPhone's and one was using a Samsung phone. No issues were reported throughout the inspection by anyone and all data was captured without issue. The person who used the Samsung phone checked the data on mobile that evening and could see the photos but the next day when he went to look he could not see the photos, on mobile or when viewing the service on ArcGIS Portal. The iPhone users experienced no similar issues and their photos were present. Other users could see on ArcGIS Portal that the data he (Samsung phone user) captured had no attachments. 

The feature service being used is a hosted feature service on ArcGIS Portal and there are no reported issues with this service. 

This user experienced similar behaviour last week and another user who used FieldMaps on a Samsung phone a few weeks ago has had the same problem. 

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Is there a way of recovering the photos or is this a bug? 

Any help appreciated. 

 

Thanks

MichaelLohr

We have had this issue reported as well, in the past, but not pinned to a particular device. We also us a combination of Android and iOS devices. It is hard to document this and the normal suspicion of the reviewers is that the field user must have done something wrong. We don't store the new data on a hosted service, but to our own ArcGIS Server, but we have still had a couple reports of this kind of "lost" data.

On recovering the photos from the hosted data, good luck. Even your system admin won't have access to the ESRI servers on the level needed to explore that. Not sure if you could get the ESRI team to explore that by opening a support call, but it might be worth a try.

We instruct field staff on attaching photos to take the photos from the mobile device camera app prior to starting the new point data capture in Field Maps, so that it gets saved to the device camera roll. Then select that photo from inside the Field Maps data collection process as opposed to snapping the photo from inside the process where it does not save to the devices camera roll. When everything works right, that is redundant and takes a few more clicks, but you also always have a backup photo. Plus it is far easier to share photos from the camera roll for other uses compared to the way you retrieve the photos from the hosted database.

Hope that helps a little. I am interested in seeing what others say.