TOPIC: Photo Caption Library

Drew it will suddenly click for you soon I am sure.

Drew, lets look at a simple case.

Right now the average inspector is going to add a caption for "Main Water Shutoff" and "Gas Shutoff" on every report. Typing those 2 captions average 1 minute for a fast typer, 2 minutes for a slow one. Across 300 inspections in a year that's 600 less captions that have to be typed. A time saving of 300 to 600 minutes, aka 5 to 10 hours per year. No other software allows you to have these captions already available in a drop down box like HIP does.

In reality most inspectors are telling us that they use at least 10 common captions on every report. This means they are saving 50 to 100 hours a year due to this feature.

Make any sense?

How about NEVER having to visit the photo editing section unless you needed to draw an arrow or circle. Now that's a time saver! Imagine the possibilities. 

I don't think it would be. The idea is that handling all photos at once, in one swoop, not having to alternate constantly between mouse and keyboard actually speeds things up quite a bit.

Drew-I use a hybrid approach with this reporting system and do things way out of the ordinary, however one thing that I see with your "master caption list" is you have to wade through 8000 potential captions to find the one you want to use.

The way it is set up now, the captions (say for the water heater) are available only under the water heater section (in the photo editing page) so the drop-down list is extremely small in comparison.

If all of your drop-down options cannot fit on the screen, any time savings is lost.

In my hybrid approach, my picture narratives are the main part of the report, not the damage sections. I would rather have a paragraph under each picture than to write a paragraph that may be one or two pages away from the photograph.

It would be really neat if we could just drag-and-drop pictures into the narrative section of the report program and have them show up where they belong, but that program structure is totally different than what we have to work with here.

If you want to do that you can use Microsoft Word (which I use for many many years) and you can do just that. But overall, you're not in the save any time because there's a whole lot more to formatting a report than messing with the pictures.

Another option would be to not to use any pictures at all (if you don't like to edit photographs). Bob and myself use our camera for everything and I would say that we spend more time in the picture editing section than any other part of the program.

For me, the picture (and its caption) are more important than anything else in the report.

One thing you have going for you is that home inspector Pro allows almost unrestricted ability to modify how you use the program (once you learn how to do it).

David you are spot on .
10 seconds per photo on average if going fast and 100% focused (like that ever happens).

My take would be for Dominic to allow caption comments as text because I spend lots of time rewriting the same thing I said already in the caption.
Yes most captions are directional and location related but when I show the kitchen sink leaking being able to type it is leaking under the photo then
show in the summary would be great.
Right now sure we can do that but only by including the photo in the summary which nobody in their right mind does.
Summary needs to be shorter for printing.

Hoping that is an update one day.(would help in mobile as well.)

Sometimes I find 10 issues under one component so as you mentioned having the text directly there and under is nice.

Also there is a direct correlation between compliments from clients when I have more editing involved.