Hi all,
I’m getting my team set up to use SMART Mobile/Connect for a biomonitoring project and really appreciating its flexibility and ease of use. We’d like to record photos and audio notes with our patrol observations. However, we work in an area with very limited WiFi, and only go to an area with better connection once every couple months. We need to get some data transmitted regularly, but the attachments could wait.
My question is – Is there a way to send just the text data to the Connect server yet retain the photos and audio when in limited WiFi, then send the remaining attachments to the Connect server only every so often, when we get into better WiFi/data connection? Ideally, the attachments would also upload automatically, just later, and still be associated with the original observations (so the option to save to the camera roll is non-ideal, but could be a last resort if upload of the photos with the other data could be suppressed). My current approach is to decrease the photo size, but even that requires more data than we expect to have, and we’d like to retain some level of image quality and this doesn’t help with audio.
I would greatly appreciate any tips or ideas!
Cheers,
Alice
Hi Alice,
There’s not currently a feature for this. It’s only possible to set the package to require wifi for upload, but no way to select what data is sent (or not - images - in this case).
That said this sounds like a good feature to have and we can explore adding this as a feature request for a future release.
In the meantime, I’m afraid there’s not really a good workaround. You mention already probably the only way to do this (save photos to your device and manually add them to observations after-the-fact).
Cheers,
Alex
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your help! I’ll try either drastically minimizing the photo quality (skipping the audio) for now and seeing how much we can get away with our satcoms connection, or saving pictures to the device and associating them later on via the date.
It would be super cool if this feature could be added in a future release. I’m imagining it as an option that can be set in the project configuration to totally split the attachments from the text during auto upload to Connect. This could be overridden by the user specifically entering a code to approve the full upload to the server when desired (or, possibly via using the device itself to test the speed of the data connection directly? or more simply sending to SMART desktop when connected via USB). Alternatively, or in addition, it would be neat if there was a way to save a high-quality photo to the camera roll and upload a low quality one, but I’m going to do some testing to see how much image quality impacts uploadability with our data connection.
Thanks again!
Alice
Hi Alice,
I think this is a great idea. I’ve submitted a development ticket for this and linked this thread.
This will be reviewed by the development team and included in future development discussions and decisions.
The feasibility of the feature will have to be looked at by our Mobile development expert but I hope to provide a positive update in the future.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Cheers,
Alex
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