Introduction

An app to automatically snap geotagged and oriented photoes from your smartphone upload them to a remote repository for structured storage.

GO TO APP

Users must be registered for the image to be accepted. Each image must be associated to a project by selecting the project from the drop down menu. The objective is crowd-sourcing information related to fuel models.

More information in the “description” section.

Funding

This work is funded from the project FIRE-RES, Innovative technologies & socio-ecological-economic solutions for fire resilient territories in Europe under the European Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101037419

FIRE-RES

Description

Differences with other crowd-collected data apps:

For example download the image HERE and right click in your PC over the downloaded file and select “properties”. In the image properties go to “details” and you will see the EXIF information below:

FIRELinks|9.2174032|44.3598822|358|86|1679734943295|3|q7p1w0a1nk

Installation

Users can directly access the app using their browser (Chrome browser is strongly encouraged) via https://www.cirgeo.unipd.it/fireres .

To access the app offline, the user must install the app in their phone.

They can do that directly from their browser by clicking “Install app” banner that pops from the top or bottom of the browser window (see left image below) or, if this banner does not appear, just go to the top right menu and select “install app” (see right image below).

This will add an icon to your smartphone where you can directly open the app also if you are not online.

Usage

User can snap photos; the Geo-Catch APP will double-check that they are geotagged correctly and will provide alerts in case your camera is not enabled to read and save location in images.

The photo will be uploaded to the server if there is internet connection, otherwise it will be cached and synced the next time that the APP detected that internet connection available. Users will not loose cached images if the Geo-Catch APP is closed, as images caught while offline will be stored until synced with server.

  1. tap the photo icon to go to capture mode - this will start streaming video from your camera; you will see two square spaces over a red background:

    • (A) top rectangle (or left if smartphone is held horizontally)
      shows an area with the video stream of your camera. On top are coordinates and accuracy (A) and azimuth and elevation angle.s

    • (B) bottom rectangle (or right if smartphone is held horizontally) has a striped background until the user taps on the video – (see images below);

  2. User taps the video a screenshot is saved in area (B) also with current coordinates and orientation of the instant the video is tapped – see second image from left below.

  3. User taps the screenshot in image area (B), and image is sent to server (see third image from left below) if phone is online. If there is no internet connection, it is not a problem, your photo will be saved (cached) and synced later

A
B

Below are the warning messages that appear if you become offline and when you come back online. All messages are also visible in the log panel.

  1. to exit the capture mode tap the red background area or the striped empty screenshot space (B)

Best and worse use-case examples

Images below are courtesy of Vasil Vassilev, University of Sofia, Bulgaria, partner of FIRE-RES project.

Ideal picture


Forest example


Shrub example


Grassland example

NOT ideal pictures


Camera moves too much and makes image blurry.


Image is too close-up to single tree or bush.


Image represents a very mixed context.


Too many pictures taken on the very same spot. Please take maximum 4 images at the 4 directions, ideally clockwise, i.e. looking North, East, South and West.


Here the picture is looking down and not at horizon.

Mapped photoes

An interactive portal, the Geo-Catch Online Viewer, is available to check your georeferenced photoes on a map.

NB: your photoes will be stored and viewed only if you validate your email. A message is by opening the log panel and clicking over your unique user id (UID). This will open your email app, and you just have to send the email to the provided address with the automatic subject.

If you do not have an email active in your smartphone or you want to send the validation request on a different email address, you can just send a normal email to from anywhere with the following string as subject: geocatchappid-<yourUID> where <yourUID> is your user id. For example if your app is like the one in the image above, send an email with the following subject:

geocatchappid-at1hbv26ki

Privacy

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe requires that no personal data be stored without the owner’s permission. This framework does not use email addresses for anything other than allowing storage of the users and validating the visualization in the Geo-Catch Online Viewer. Addresses are stored safely and not available to third parties.

Known bugs, issues and important info