Tutorials › Capture & tag site photos

Capture & tag site photos

⏱️ 5 minutes · Beginner · Works offline · Last updated 2026-05-23

Site photos are the most-used artefact on construction projects. This tutorial covers the three ways to capture them in Planscape, how to attach them to the right thing, and how the auto-geotag / auto-thumbnail / auto-compress pipeline works behind the scenes.

Three capture flows

Flow 1 — Standalone site photo

For documenting progress without tying to a specific issue or element.

  1. Bottom tab bar → Photos.
  2. Tap the floating camera button (bottom right).
  3. Take the photo. The viewfinder shows your current GPS coordinates at the top so you can confirm.
  4. Tap the checkmark to use it.
  5. Add an optional caption ("Pour 4 of Level 2 slab, southeast corner").
  6. Tap Save.

The photo lands in the project's photo stream, geotagged, timestamped, and visible to all project members.

Flow 2 — Attached to an issue

For evidence supporting a defect, RFI, or NCR. See Raise an issue from your phone for the full flow — the photo capture step is the same as above but the photo gets attached to the issue you're creating.

Flow 3 — Attached to a specific element

For commissioning records, asset photos, before/after pairs on a specific piece of equipment.

  1. Bottom tab bar → Map (or open an element via QR scan).
  2. Tap the element in the 2D view, or scan its QR tag.
  3. Element detail panel opens. Scroll to "Photos" section.
  4. Tap + Add photo.
  5. Camera opens with the element name pre-filled in the caption prompt.
  6. Take, confirm, save.

The photo is now part of that element's permanent record. Anyone viewing that element later sees the photo.

Picking from your gallery

Every photo flow has a "From gallery" option alongside "Take photo". Useful for:

Gallery photos still get geotagged if the original photo had GPS metadata. If they don't, the location is recorded as "Unknown".

What happens to each photo

When you tap Save, Planscape does this in roughly 1 second on a typical photo:

  1. Saves the original (usually 4 MB JPEG, 12 MP) to local storage.
  2. Generates a 400px-wide thumbnail for fast list-view loading.
  3. Stamps the file with GPS coordinates, capture time, and your user ID.
  4. If online: uploads original + thumbnail to the server in the background. You see "Synced" on the photo card within ~10 seconds.
  5. If offline: queues for upload. You see "Queued (N)" in the status indicator.

Configuring quality / size

Profile → Settings → Photos:

The thumbnail is always 400px regardless of quality setting — affects only the original.

Viewing photos

The Photos tab lists every project photo in reverse chronological order. Each card shows:

Tap a thumbnail to open the full-screen viewer with pinch-zoom, swipe-between-photos, share, and "Show on map" actions.

The map view of photos

Map → Layers → enable Photo locations. Every photo appears as a small camera icon at the GPS coordinates of capture. Tap an icon to preview, tap again to open full screen.

Useful for spatial debugging: "where was that crack we photographed last week?" — open the map, find the camera icon, tap to confirm.

Captions worth writing

A caption you'll thank yourself for in three months:

Voice-to-text is faster than typing on site — tap the microphone icon in the caption field.

Privacy & storage

Photos taken in the app are NOT saved to your phone's camera roll by default. This avoids leaking client work into your personal photo backup.

To save a copy to your camera roll: open the photo in the full-screen viewer → share → "Save to camera roll". You can also enable auto-save under Profile → Settings → Photos → "Save copies to camera roll: On".

Storage usage on your phone: Profile → Settings → Storage. Tap "Free up space" to delete locally-cached originals (thumbnails stay). The originals are safe on the server and re-download on demand.

Common mistakes

What's next