ARcGIS Fieldmaps - photo attachment, new workflow confirmation

Question

G'day all

Just a quick one. After the last update ESRI appear to have added the seemingly unnecessary step of having to add attachments capability to take a photo. Where before we just had to ensure 'Enable attachments' was active on the Feature Layer to capture a photo in FieldMaps, can I please confirm that we now have to manually add an attachment field in the FieldMaps designer? Also, it appears both 'General' and 'Media' attachment options add both exactly the same functionality (Take Photo and Attach).

I know it's not much, but seems like an unnecessary change that hasn't really been that well documented. I don't see it reflected in any instructions as yet.

Cheers

TanithLives · Answer

G'day @RPGIS and @KVNSCK. Thanks very much for the clarification. It caught myself and my colleagues a bit by surprise the first time we built our maps, not being that well flagged in the update notification. It does add more steps for us, but I can see how it could improve the process for others. Cheers

KVNSCK · Answer

Hi @TanithLives  🙂

You are correct, adding an attachment form element is now required in order to capture photos in Field Maps version 26.2.1 on IOS and Android. It seems that this was designed to give more control over the number of attachments, and what type of documents, can be uploaded in Field Maps.

Field Maps designer should automatically add an attachment form element for you upon opening the application -- if your layer has attachments enabled and was created prior to this update.

I agree, both "General" and "Media" form elements are very similar, but based off what I found the Media attachment element gives more control over image size, and video duration than the General attachment element.

I hope this information helps, and provides some documentation on the changes recently made to the application!

RPGIS · Answer

Hi @TanithLives,

Regarding the attachments I think, if I am understanding the updates correctly, is to enable different types of attachments and to also be able to distinguish between the types of attachments. The workflow should be the same but my guess is that Esri realized that users were requesting the ability to differentiate attachments.

It could also be due to file sizes since not all file types are equal in size, similar to photos.