TOPIC: Comments available for Photo captions?

I see that comments are available to be used as captions only after they are first used as comments in tabbed section first. Is there away to have narratives available for use as captions with out having to first use them in report sections? Currently we are working to transition from paper to digital reporting. We have been using another software to do a photo report separate from out written report. It is a laborious process of adding comment to each photo and then having to manually spell check. Many of the comments are commonly used narratives. It would be great to be able to use HIP for the photo reporting until we have worked out the kinks for the transition. (our kinks and not the software's) Is this possible? I thought that when we were at Inspectorworld Vegas there was mention of making all narrative available for captions once the photo was assigned to a tabbed section.

Yes, use the new Caption feature we added a few months ago. What you do is add a narrative like you usually would but click the CAPTION button when editing the text so that Caption shows at the front of the narrative. This will make that comment always shot in that particular section as a possible caption.

I am also in the process of making the transition to HIP having had it for a couple of months now, but have still not felt comfortable using it for an official report yet. The reports I currently produce are a big hit with agents and clients and I want to make sure I can stay as close to what I am doing now, but spend less time producing the report.

As for the captions, my current reports have any related pictures below the appropriate comments. It appears that HIP just bundles them all by sub-category which is fine if you only have one comment per sub-category. In an effort to reduce the navigation necessary during an inspection, I try to incorporate as many comments as practical under each tab.

It would be great if selecting a comment from the captions drop down, would actually attach the picture directly above or below the chosen comment in the generated report instead of just at the end of the sub-section. There are times when I use more than one picture per comment and being able to assign several pictures to the same comment would also be great with out duplicating the comment each time.

Could this easily be incorporated?

Hi Andy

We purposely do not do this in HIP as it creates a ton of white space in a report. This greatly increases the length of the report and the overall consensus is that it doesn't look as clean as pictures all over. Most sections only have a few comments with the pictures all of an inch below them. Then you have the captions directly below the photograph which you can select without typing anything as selected comments are already available as captions. This gives you the option of captioning every picture easily as well as a clean look.

The bad part is I'm about to go through the painful process of getting rid of all selection sections
and going with defect sections "only" due to not being able to put material comments as captions.

Not sure why it is set up that way but I can not use selection comments as captions.

My point here is be careful and do not use selection sections in your template if you wish to work with pictures for notes.

Do you put materials as captions? You could use the caption feature for that.