What am I missing here? The response here seems to be on the up and up. The OP has access to ArcGIS Pro and the feature service (hosted or referenced). Each piece of software mentioned is in the ESRI ecosystem... they have all the pieces that is. Everything can be brought straight into Pro or Story Maps via ArcGIS Online, where the data was submitted to, the photos included.
The photos don't live in the Field Maps App, they where submitted to the datastore in AGOL 1 feature at a time by multiple people throughout the outing.
Even if it is all about access to the photos and Field Map's DID save them to the device and you wanted to cut ArcGIS out of the picture, you would still have to transfer them to a computer which require the use another tool to extract them from everyone's camera rolls and yet another piece of software to get them all in one place and yet another piece of software to create a product of them. At least here they are all in one place and with proper associations to their features and there is the option to be used natively in ArcGIS Apps.
If this was an offline workflow and everything failed to sync, then that is another matter, but that was not indicated.
While FM saving to the camera roll would be nice to have, one easy solution is to just own your photos to start with. Take the photo with whatever photo app you want & maintain them in whatever photo mgmt software you want on your device, simply attach them to your features in FM from your camera roll rather than choosing to use the built-in camera app where ESRI won't save to the camera roll. It is a pretty common workflow to have an app running in the background, take a photo, and then bring your app back to the foreground to attach the photo.
For example, on certain projects our staff are required to use something like Theodolite or Solcator for taking photos so that we have a stamped and unstamped versions and attach both in FM.
At an enterprise level, the last thing I want is for 100's or 1000's of users to be managing their own photos with xyz app across 100's of projects. I wouldn't even want 1 user managing the photos on 1 project. I want the attachments in my database in real-time, associated with their feature data so that I can do whatever we need to with them and whenever we need. Having the photos save to the camera roll might even be a security risk or NDA breach on certain projects. It is also kind of nice not having my phone bloated with a bunch of work pictures and videos.
I get it though, some users create the feature service and deploy the map as well as collect data in the field and then have to process the data and attachments at the end of the day; but, I'm still not sure what exactly are we seeking a solution to? The map can be embedded into StoryMaps where the photos would be accessible via the feature's popup or a dashboard can be built. The photo's can be extracted with Pro with direct access to the feature service and these can be used to create a Story Map. Attachment extraction can be automated with the REST or Python API's or FME or a host of other cloud services. You can own the photos in your camera roll and attach to Field Maps instead capturing directly in Field Maps so that you have direct access to the free, unadulterated jpegs on your device. Maybe having a map level option to save photos to the device is the solution, then the owner of the map can decide what happens.
- Justin Reynolds, PE
