How to show near real time photos taken by smartphone in ArcGIS?

PooyaDarghiasi · ‎03-10-2020

Hi guys! I am pretty new to ArcGIS and I am going to start a project, I need your help! What I am trying to do is to find a way to show near real time photos of road condition on the map. To do this we are going to use mounted smartphones on moving trucks that automatically take pictures every 10 minutes, and then to show the photos on the map for a maximum time of 1 hour and after that it disappear (something like attached photo). At this time I have no idea how to approach this problem. There are so many tools and methods available in ArcGIS like Quick capture, collector for ArcGIS and etc., but I think they don't work for this project since they all have their own limitations that don't fit for this project. I will appreciate it if anyone has any idea that how should I approach this problem. At least I need some clue to follow to make this happen. Thank you all!

IsmaelChivite · ‎03-12-2020

Hi!. To my knowledge, there is no out of the box mobile app in ArcGIS that will help capture a photo at a regular time interval. If you know how to tinker with AppStudio for ArcGIS code, you can download the source code of ArcGIS QuickCapture and create a custom version of the app to do this. I think that QuickCapture would be the closest and easiest to adjust to your requirement. One advantage of QuickCapture is that your photos will be automatically located and sent to your ArcGIS feature layer, so your live map would be virtually done at that moment.

Another alternative, although it also involves development, is to look for an app out there that would capture photos automatically. Most phones these days encode in the EXIF header of the photos the XY coordinates where the photo was taken. You can then use ArcPy to upload these photos into a feature layer. I am not clear how you could automatically download the photos from the device but if you find an app out there that takes the photos and uploads them into Google Drive or something like that, I am guessing you could chain the whole thing.

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IsmaelChivite · ‎03-12-2020

Hi!. To my knowledge, there is no out of the box mobile app in ArcGIS that will help capture a photo at a regular time interval. If you know how to tinker with AppStudio for ArcGIS code, you can download the source code of ArcGIS QuickCapture and create a custom version of the app to do this. I think that QuickCapture would be the closest and easiest to adjust to your requirement. One advantage of QuickCapture is that your photos will be automatically located and sent to your ArcGIS feature layer, so your live map would be virtually done at that moment.

Another alternative, although it also involves development, is to look for an app out there that would capture photos automatically. Most phones these days encode in the EXIF header of the photos the XY coordinates where the photo was taken. You can then use ArcPy to upload these photos into a feature layer. I am not clear how you could automatically download the photos from the device but if you find an app out there that takes the photos and uploads them into Google Drive or something like that, I am guessing you could chain the whole thing.