idea Image Location & Direction on Map in Report in ArcGIS Survey123 Ideas

Image Location & Direction on Map in Report

JZeeb_Tosv — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:44:27 GMT

Survey 123 has a great feature when looking at inspections online. When you look under the Data tab of a survey on Survey 123 online, you can see the "form" view of an inspection and click on a photo that was taken during the inspection. When the photo has location & direction metadata, the form shows the location of where the photo was taken and the direction the camera was in on a map (see attached image). It's so cool, my coworkers have asked that I include a map like it, for each image, in our Report template. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, that feature is not available when building a report. Can Esri make this feature available in report expressions so I can make my coworkers happy?

Re: Image Location & Direction on Map in Report

Derrick_Westoby — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:39:29 GMT

Hi @JZeeb_Tosv - You can do this right now! Search for "currentLayer" on this help page.

Set up the symbology on your feature layer's visualization tab (not web map) to display an arrow and rotate based on an attribute value (make sure you're capturing the image direction in the form, and that it's a numeric field). Then, use "drawingInfo:"currentLayer" in your report template.

Disclaimer - Setting the symbology in your feature layer doesn't always produce the desired symbology in the report instantly. On the last 2 surveys/reports I did this on, one of them instantly worked as expected. On the other, I spent 2 days trying to figure it out before giving up. It automagically started working correctly a week later.

Here's mine (not using rotate by attribute on this particular one)

Report template (one map is a summary map for all repeats, the other is for individual records)

And here's the output report

Re: Image Location & Direction on Map in Report

AlfredBaldenweck — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:56:02 GMT

Do you have to do something fancy to get a photopoint?

Re: Image Location & Direction on Map in Report

Derrick_Westoby — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:37:01 GMT

@AlfredBaldenweck - You can extract the lat/long of the photo from the exif when you attach it in Survey123, if it has the lat/long. Also the image direction, and other info. For ease of use, it's helpful to store them in a field. I had old forms set up this way, but now I just use the current location of the geopoint, extract the heading, and ignore the lat/long of the photo.

Here's the blog post that taught me how: Working with EXIF image metadata in Survey123 for ArcGIS