Photo Quality Degraded in Survey

[BrandonMarshall1]

We have currently deployed several surveys created via Survey123 Connect that are being used by ~200 users in our ArcGIS Online organization and allow them to attach photos. Lately, we've been getting complaints of photos coming out blurry, and after checking, it appears the photos are being reduced in resolution and compressed. This is despite the photo size setting in Connect being set to "Unrestricted". 

We've tested taking photos directly in the S123 app vs. attaching photos taken through the default camera app. It appears attaching a photo rather than using the camera in the survey does produce better quality, but the photo is still reduced in size and quality from the original.

To illustrate the problem, attached are two images: a photo taken using my phone's camera app, and the same photo  after being attached to the survey.

To further complicate things, this issue isn't happening for everyone, and we're thinking the issue may be tied to what phone is being used. The majority of our users are using S123 with phones supplied by our organization (iPhone 6 or 7). However, my coworker and I both use Android Moto devices and my photos are being affected while hers are not. We haven't been able to find any settings that could be responsible for this difference.

We've just put a call in to Esri about this issue, but I figured I would ask here in case anyone else has run into it. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Brandon

[Anonymous User]

Hi Eric,

The changes in Connect on the Images tab were purely a rename of the settings and adding a new setting for a larger 1920 pixel size. The old settings of Low, Med, High map directly to 320, 640, 1280 sizes, 1920 is a new size option, and Unrestricted is the same as before. This was to make it clearer to users what exactly Low, Med, High actually represented as there was some confusion and it can mean different things on different devices (relative the to the camera you are using). Therefore the only change to what sizes can be set in Connect is that there is now a new option for 1920.

As for the differences in file size you see with different images attached to the survey in different workflows, this is expected, however in all cases the image size setting in Connect for that survey will be honoured. There are 4 ways to attach an image to a survey and if using the unrestricted file size it will be honoured in all cases, except when combing images with watermarks on iOS.

1) Upload existing image from image gallery.
2) Take photo with camera icon from within Survey123 app.
3) Take photo with camera icon from within Survey123 app with watermarks enabled.
4) Using annotate appearance to take photo with camera icon or select image from gallery onto the canvas.

Here is a brief explanation of each workflow and the expected behaviour:

1) Using an unrestricted image size survey set in Connect, if you take an image with the device app camera and check the pixel size (not just mb size), it will be created at the setting size of the device app camera (on an iPhone 6 with with iOS 11 this is 2448 x 3264). If you then open a survey and use the browse gallery option to select that file and attach to the survey, submit to AGO, download the attachment from Data tab in AGO and check the pixel size, it will be the same as the original file in the camera roll on the device (2448 x 3264 in my test case and the quality looks the same). The image file size in mb is different, but this is due to the way images are compressed and saved in Survey123 and AGO, versus directly on the device. This shows that the unrestricted file size is working as expected for camera roll selected images.

2) When taking a photo with the camera icon from within Survey123 app, the image will also be unrestricted if set in Connect, however it is possible that the image size in pixels may vary slightly when selecting an image from camera roll. This is because the view finder area when the camera is initialised is a different size inside the Survey123 app versus with the native camera app. In the case of the iPhone 6 the size was 2448 x 3264, which is exactly the same as native camera app. On other devices and OS versions, we have seen the size is slightly smaller due to the aspect ratio differences between the view finder in the camera apps.

3) When using watermarks with the Survey123 app camera on iOS the unrestricted image size will be scaled down to 1920 due to a known issue with iOS and watermarks and the canvas causing the app to crash. This is documented here: Watermarks—Survey123 for ArcGIS | Documentation. For Android and other OS versions, the unrestricted image size in honoured with watermarks.

4) For annotate appearance on image questions, the image size is not calculated from the camera view finder, but is calculated from the canvas size of the app window that you are pasting the image onto, either from the camera in the app or from the image gallery. The original size of the image in the gallery or the app camera is not kept, the image is pasted on the canvas to fit the width or height (which ever is bigger), and then the size of the canvas will be the saved image size in pixels of all the contents on the canvas. This means sometimes that there is white canvas space at the top and bottom of the image added via annotate, as the aspect ratio of the original image collected and the canvas are not the same. The file size of the final image saved from the canvas will then honour the settings in Connect and be set as either 320, 640, 1280, 1920 or unrestricted.

We are currently aware of an issue with the annotate appearance where the quality of the image added via annotate (either using default image from media folder, app camera or image gallery) is causing the image to appear blurry, even though the image size in pixels is the same. This issue appears to have been introduced with version 3.5 as the quality was as expected in the previous version 3.3. There were some changes in 3.5 to support watermarks and fix canvas loading scaling issues, which may have adversely affected the quality for annotated images.We are working on this issue and hope to have a fix available in a future update: https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2017/10/09/smart-skething-in-survey123-stroke-by-st....

Let me know if that helps explain the process and if you think the problem you are seeing is the same as the annotate canvas issue mentioned in my last paragraph. If you think the issue is something else, can you please provide more details. That would be very helpful.

Regards,
Phil.