TOPIC: Adding photo captions to the summary?

In my former inspection/report writing process I document practically all deficiencies with a digital camera.

When I return to the office I view the photographs and dictate with voice recognition software, the report synopsis.  I do not always use the picture in the report, rather included as an attachment for future reference, indicating the photograph number in the inspection report efficiency.

My report writing style is mostly narrative and these narratives change from report to report.  There are common scenarios that can be "canned", but for the most part I make modifications on  almost every discrepancy in the narrative.


I want to keep away from the "hunt and click" process commonly found with inspection software.  I wish to keep my damage lists down to a minimum and use photographs with elaborated captions to cover the situation.

The problem with this I find is that though this process is handled very well in the body of the report, it is difficult to go back and enter a discrepancy that will end up in the summary page.  It takes too much time to bounce between the photograph section in the narrative section of the report.

I narrate the captions of the photographs using voice dictation and copy/paste these narratives to photograph caption.  This is extremely fast and effective.  The only problem is that I must also copy them to the narrative so they will show up in the summary.  This makes the report longer as it is duplicating the caption in the report body.  Also copying to the report body must later be removed or modified as the narration may not be suitable to use on the next inspection.

What I would like to see, is the ability to manually select the narrative of a photograph that I wish to have published in the summary page.

Is this now available, or can it be achieved?

Hi Dave,

I know I already responded to this question a few hours ago as you emailed it to me too, but I wanted to post my response here so people don't think I'm flaking on you.

As you saw, you can now select from the caption drop down list any caption that you have added to the section. As you have noted, you would also end up with the caption duplicated. The drop down list was added in the last version as people wanted the information duplicated. Any comment marked in red in the report is what appears in the summary as you know.

Here is what I'm working on for the next release, tell me if this works for you. I'm working on a photo slide strip that will show at the bottom of every section (i.e. Bathroom->Cabinets) with the click of a button (so it won't show by default and take up room, but you can click a button and they will appear. The process would be, batch add all your photos. Go through and mark the section they are going to appear in. Then go through your report. Now you'd be able to see the Bathroom Cabinet photos at the bottom of the Bathroom Cabinet section. This will make the process of writing narratives within the actual sections MUCH easier as there will be no flipping back and forth. Since the photos print directly into the section anyways, I don't think you'd need to add the comments as captions, if anything you could just number them. Let me know if you think this will cover it for you.

Dominic