[rt-users] Thumbnails from attachments?

Yan Seiner yan at seiner.com
Tue Jun 14 14:18:44 EDT 2011


Here's what happens:

We're a water utility, so all of our stuff is burried.

We provide the crew with a set of drawings.  Since most of what we do is
repair, we try to locate old lines, other utilities, etc. as best as we
can.  However, few utilities kept accurate records early on, so we often
do not know exactly what is in the ground.

The crew goes out into the field and starts digging and laying pipe.  They
have to close up the excavation at the end of every day (we can't keep
open holes in public streets overnight).

Very often the crew finds that the conditions differ from the drawings. 
They keep pretty good notes but without pictures it's hard to figure out
what they did where.  So they take pictures.

When the project is done, we have to reconcile the materials inventory and
correct our drawings for the as-built conditions.

The tech who does that work starts with our engineering drawings and the
crew field notes.  He would like to refer to the pictures when he has a
question.  However, the pictures are all similar; a guy with a shovel
standing in a hole that has a pipe at the bottom.  Without some commentary
it's hard to pick the right picture for the aa-built condition we're
trying to verify.

Often the as-built conditions can be difficult to tell apart without a
picture; we know the crew used an 11 degree bend and a 22 degree bend, but
in which order?  how far apart?  A picture can tell us those things.

We'd like to be able to go through the pictures and read the comments
quickly.

On Tue, June 14, 2011 10:59 am, Kenneth Crocker wrote:
> Yan,
>
>
> What is that "one image" you want to see? How do you find it now? If there
> is any way you can distinguish it from a list of stuff, then we can do
> that
> with code.
>
> Kenn
> LBNL
>
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com> wrote:
>
>> Right now we send each crew a ticket "stub", essentially an empty
>> comment
>> to the ticket they're working on.  They then reply to that stub over and
>> over with pictures.  We found that makes it easy on the field guys and
>> RT
>> keeps everything organized.
>>
>> The problem is that we're getting lots of pics - sometimes 5 or 10 a day
>> every day for a 3 week job.  There's no consistent naming scheme we can
>> enforce.  These are construction guys.  They want to point, click, send.
>> Thus the need on the office end for thumbnails.
>>
>> I know we're taking RT in a direction that's not typical, but the
>> construction industry doesn't really have an effective affordable
>> project
>> management tool and RT is a natural near-drop-in solution.  The
>> construction PM tools that are out there are expensive and klunky.
>>
>> On Tue, June 14, 2011 10:19 am, Kenneth Crocker wrote:
>> > Yan,
>> >
>> > Any correspondence to RT can have an attachment, so it doesn't have to
>> be
>> > a
>> > comment and it will still be in your history. As to the pics, if there
>> is
>> > a
>> > way to label/title/name each pic in a manner that would enable easy
>> > identification might work, as you can see the name of the attachment
>> in
>> > the
>> > Display page of a ticket.
>> >
>> > Kenn
>> > LBNL
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 6:01 AM, Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> We have field crews that send pictures into RT tickets from job
>> sites.
>> >>  This is a great help as we get instant notification of issues and
>> also
>> >> for
>> >> as-builts.  Typically the crews will send a picture and a text
>> >> description
>> >> of image as a comment to the ticket.  As the crews send us more and
>> more
>> >> pictures, we're finding that it's hard to find that one image we need
>> >> quickly.
>> >>
>> >> We're looking for an enhancement to RT that would create a thumbnail
>> >> gallery from the image/jpeg attachments and display the comment text
>> on
>> >> mouseover.  The thumbnail gallery would be displayed as part of the
>> >> ticket.
>> >>
>> >> Anyone have any idea if something like this has been done?
>> >>
>> >> A simpler solution but not as desirable would be to create a
>> thumbnail
>> >> of
>> >> jpegs in the history or in the attachment list.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> My daughter is racing a triathlon to raise money for her swim club.
>> Want
>> to help?
>>
>> http://akari.seiner.com
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> !DSPAM:4df7a1da98651848747371!
>


-- 
My daughter is racing a triathlon to raise money for her swim club.  Want
to help?

http://akari.seiner.com





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