Issues following Attachment Viewer updates on desktop and mobile

[archDisk]

First off, I am extremely happy overall with the updates to the Attachment Viewer. I have been working on a personal project for a year now related to the September 11 attacks and mapping out every photo taken in the city that day and the Attachment Viewer is exactly the kind of tool I pictured in my head when I was tired of working with the "Google My Maps" tool and lack of features.

With the change, I've run into a few immediate issues:

1.) When clicking on a point on the map, it will reset the view to a very distant zoom:

Example: Clicking any point here --

Switches the view to this distant height:

This did not occur prior to the update and it makes it difficult when constantly clicking between points on the map.

2.) Hovering over images in the attachment viewer gallery no longer shows the name on the image.

This one is more Quality of Life, but I am not sure why this feature is no longer there. Now if you hover over a photo in the gallery view, it will just highlight the point on the map and shows the name directly on the map. Seeing the name directly on the image in the attachment gallery view was very helpful when quickly scrolling through images.

3.) Mobile - Unable to properly render tools and settings.

The mobile interface is miles better than it was previously and I am very thankful that you can now scroll through the gallery at the same time as viewing the map. This was very difficult to explain when showing this to other people.

The issue though now is after this update, you can no longer efficiently use the tools.

At the top-right of the screen, you can see the filters, layers, legend, and selection tools.

When clicking them, they are unable to display properly.

Prior to the recent updates, these were stacked vertically rather than horizontally and could be viewed without any issue.

I also have one additional minor feedback and that is the introduction of the new "Additional locations" feature which appears at the bottom of the screen after clicking on a point.

My only grievance with it is that this shows images from around the 100 last points to be added. Because of this, if no changes are made, it's constantly showing the same 100 attachments regardless of if you're clicking one of many thousands of other points. I feel it would be improved if it could behave the same as the normal attachment gallery view that shows attachments in ascending/descending order based on your current view. That way if you want to continue scrolling through attachments from a given viewpoint, you don't need to close out of the current point to move to the next.

And because of this behavior, I would also have preferred if this were to be an optional toggle rather than a strict requirement to be included.

In any case, I am overall a huge fan of these upgrades!

[MErikReedAugusta]

This is great feedback, and I hope it can be addressed in a near version.  I've been heavily focused in ArcPro the last two months with a major schema project and haven't kept up with AGOL, but we're just transitioning back to working on some AGOL workflows, so I'm excited to tinker with these new attachment tools.

As an aside, the project in question is also fascinating.  Are you going to be sharing it publicly when you're finished?  It seems like it'd be a great showcase of what the attachment tools can do.

[archDisk]

Thank you! I would love to share it publicly but the two issues I have are 1.) I think it might become out-of-scope for a personal license and the $700/yr in licensing for the Creator license is more than I can afford (currently paying the $100+$120 for credits and it already hurts), and 2.) Copyright issues. I have written permission from about 50 photographers for around 500 photographs to add them to the map, but in total I have photos from about 1,500 individuals totaling around 25,000 images. I have been adding them all to this map in the meantime and am tagging each one with a field to identify if I am authorized to show it or not, so one day I can have a publicly-shared map.

My only experience with ArcGIS before this project was that in my previous role in IT at a city, we had a GIS Administrator. It has been a lot of fun learning everything from scratch and turning this vision into my head into a functional tool. Many, many hours have been spent watching YouTube videos, posting on Reddit, and on here.

[SarahMcDonald_Esri · Accepted solution]

Hi @archDisk 

Thanks for reaching out about Attachment Viewer! The feedback is very much appreciated! I wanted to follow up on some of the questions/issues you are running into:

1. There was a previous issue with the scale to zoom to setting not working as expected, so that was fixed with the update. You might just need to update that setting in the app configuration to reflect the scale you want to feature to zoom to when selecting one from the gallery. 

2. We thought that having the labels on both the attachment in the gallery and in the label in the map was potentially a bit redundant. However, I understand what you mean with it being helpful especially if you are scrolling through the features. I will make a note on this one and discuss with the team. 

3. We patched an issue with the filter last night on mobile, but I see this morning that the layer list and legend still have the issue. I will discuss this one with the team to see if this is something we can patch. 

4. Yes, totally understand this feedback. We have discussed previously adding an option to hide the filmstrip gallery in the future, so that app authors can hide that if they want. I will also look into the behavior that you mentioned with how the filmstrip gallery updates(or doesn't update) as you navigate the features in the app. 

Again, thanks again for reaching out about this. This is great feedback and I will discuss this with the team to see how we can continue to improve the app. 

Thanks!

Sarah

[archDisk]

Thank you very much for the information! I will follow your steps to fix the zoom.

I appreciate everything you all have been doing, thank you!

[BrookeAumann]

Thanks for this info Sarah- we are having problems too and I made a post about it (https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-instant-apps-questions/attachment-viewer-does-not-respect-filte..., and we've opened a support case. I'd be interested in your feedback based on our workflow and how we can use the new attachment viewer.

[BvanRest]

I would like to use the attachment viewer for stained glass windows, on desktop and mobile,  however the ribbon shows stretched images since last update. I presume because the size differs. Can I do anything about it? Or could you make the ribbon optional?

See Glas in lood kaart NL (POC2): zoek een plaats of klik op een gele of rode punt

[SarahMcDonald_Esri]

Hi @BvanRest 

Suer thing! We have thumbnail settings in the app configuration to adjust the look. If you go to the app configuration, navigate to the Attachment settings - you will find two settings: Thumbnail format & Thumbnail height. Those settings will allow you to adjust the thumbnail to avoid images looking stretched.

Thanks!

Sarah