Creating a KMZ for Site Pictures

The office reliance on photos is just a waste of time and more data to store. If the photos are not generated by scanning, lidar, drone flights on your coordinate system, they are useless, for the most part, because you can't pull dimensions from them.

Since the dawn of surveying, good field notes have always given everybody what they need to know. Somehow, since the age of digital cameras, everybody wants pictures that really hold no value, other than for a presentation or rendering.

Geosetter is great, thanks for the heads-up! I rely on photos on most jobs for details. Field notes are essential, but a picture is still worth a thousand words, especially when it's so easy to plot them in GE.

Trimble also has a good workflow for this assuming you're all in with the yellow box. We use the camera on the TSC5 with Trimble Access to geotag photos that in turn make their way to the project folder along with the raw file. I drag and drop the jxl into Trimble Business Center and points with a photo have a unique display icon. It's extremely helpful with existing conditions surveys for engineering design as even the most seasoned party chief may not know the correct terminology for each and every component of a given industrial system. I have my guys take geotag photos of boundary monuments as an insurance policy that the found monumentation is described correctly.

[Sarcasm alert] Here's one to curl the toes of the minimalist surveyor who likes to label every corner, "EIP", and provide one or two copies of a black and white plat as the sole deliverable: I send georeferenced KMZs to clients (yes with a disclaimer about cell phone GPS accuracy) showing their boundary lines along with nodes that upon selection display the description of the monuments along with a pic (if using a PC not cell phone). It's incredibly time-consuming to tie surveys to state plane and export KMZs from CAD, not to mention that it takes work away from GIS tax map makers, which hurts surveyors (GIS = Get It Surveyed right?). Also, pictures take up so much space on a hard drive that I really wouldn't recommend this process to others given the high cost of digital storage these days. It'd be gross to assume that the typical PLS could afford to provide clients with more than what was given in 1970 when it now costs $0.000325 per 10MB picture stored. I'm not sure how I can even pay the crews with this cost plus the color ink I waste providing orthoimagery in the background of at least one version of the plats delivered to my clients. I should probably stop doing this as the typical reaction from clients is something akin to, "I don't need all these darned pictures and Google crap to know where my boundary is now that it's been surveyed. You must think I'm too stupid to calculate the change in magnetic declination from 1946 to present and run a bearing for a half a mile through an Eastern forest."

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Thanks for the tip. I've been a big proponent of site photos since the days of film. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when they person doing the mapping is not the person that was in the field. Photos also help my clients, mainly engineers, better visualize the site. This looks like a great way to organize the photos.

I currently utilize multiple methods to acquire site photos. For point specific photography, say a monument cap or tower antenna mount, I can utilize the camera on my CS/TPS and Captivate will reference that photo to the point or line feature. The feature number becomes part of the photo's file name. As an added bonus, the photo is XREFed into the drawing at the correct location when exported from Infinity. For general site photos I utilize my phones camera, which is where GeoSetter looks like it will shine. For the past year or so I've also been utilizing an Insta360 panoramic camera. One shot gets me a panoramic photo with very little effort. With the proper viewer you can pan around the image and see everything. I'm curious to see if GeoSetter will work with the panoramic images as well.

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Pictures are a no-brainer. I tell my guys to take pictures all the time. The storage of data is basically free at this point.

Sure field notes and shots and all the rest, but our industry pushes those with the most experience into the office, and that means that pictures (video is better) are very useful in a feedback/training loop without putting the project surveyor on the ground for each survey location.

This has the most context in small lot surveys. Walk the boundary, take a video, make a narrative of what you located, point out what you shot. Takes 10 minutes, and it is practice for a party chief when they are writing narratives some day. When the office guy looks at it, they can provide feedback. And when the drafter is trying to make sense of something, it is all there in the video.

It is too easy, too cheap, too useful to not have pictures and video.

As for construction staking, I don't really care. If they don't trust that I set the stakes, then we have deeper issues. I would rather have them than not, just because they are basically free, but they are not critical in my view.

There are soft benefits to pictures: if you are in a multi-disciplinary firm, it is highly useful for a party chief to increase their visibility to the firm as a whole if they provide pictures to the engineers and such. They love that stuff, and since most never get out of the office, it really makes them feel like there is communication going on. If you are a party chief, and you want to increase the positive perception of yourself, this is a good idea, in my opinion.

I don't always take pictures on site, but when I do I've been happy with the Solocator app, which gives location, direction date/project stamps and allows for upload to common cloud storage at selected resolution along with the kmz. Probably similar to this one described here.