Aaron Dahl
I am the only one at my firm who creates, edits, and shares libraries; hence I am the only one at my firm with the PRO plan. I am certainly the heaviest user of the system, but we have 5-6 other people frequently inputting data. As architects, we collect a lot of photos during our course of work and the various related libraries have photo fields to report progress of work and issues that are encountered during construction.
We have been struggling a lot with photos and how they are handled within Memento and Google Sheets since we began using Memento Database about two years ago. I am slowly working on developing new Jasper Reports, but for the time being, we have dozens of report formats developed in an extensive array of Google Sheets that we have to use. The Google Sheets integration was a primary factor in our moving forward with Memento. What I want to do is be able to sync the data (and images) with Google Sheets, then I can use the standard query and filter functions within GSheets to quickly produce professional reports.
Each of the libraries are linked to Google Sheet and I have selected the option to “Upload files (images) attached to records to cloud storage”.
When one of my employees uses their phone or their desktop version of MDB (Lite plan) to capture images and then I sync the data to Google Sheets (from my phone), Memento does the following:
In the “Image” field it provides me the mementoserver address to the file (http://mementoserver.appspot.com/blob/get?blob=AMIfv976L6wlZ11Jal_IL4r697a1-taASF6bvMSSy1WSmUd0Qhchkl5tOdG7O4DoxItSg5to4gtCLDHxvDib5i4QXdfXiC1TclhxEp9gC4GGTyGAD_kESVUYwuavETZZnEzQCN9Q__1Zegu30ilXLzwWUVsrQukofygDuvMmDEtOU1qt2TGeIh5WPmGLUzQT7KfBczE0J8WV)
Within the “Image.http” field it provides me the internal link to the file on the Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/a/acuform.com/uc?id=1yQb3-3RLJcg0aFWKwH-8orznWRjQm-7q)
When I use my Memento Desktop Application (PRO version) to add records, I have the same behavior as above. This is the desired and anticipated behavior, and permits us to quickly produce our professional reports including the captured photos, but…
When I use my phone (PRO plan) to capture the images (either use the camera app within MDB or take the photo with my phone’s camera app and upload to the MDB) and sync to Google Sheets Memento does the following:
In the “Image” field it provides me the phone path to the file (file:///data/user/0/com.android.providers.downloads/cache/1458724387369.jpg).
This is precisely where I need Google Sheets to capture the mementoserver address, not the phone’s local storage location - within Google Sheets there is no way to pull these images from a file:// path.. of my phone.
Currently, what I do is capture all the information in the field with my phone, then sync the data. Then when I get back to the office, I use the Memento Desktop Application to open the same files and replace the images with the ones that were copied to the Google Drive. Then I go back to my phone again, refresh the library (the images will briefly disappear then reappear - this is the way I know it has refreshed), then I re-sync to Google Sheets (which now provides me a mementoserver address) and finally I go to my Google Sheets form and the images appear. Sometimes, we have dozens of photos.
I thought this behavior was a result of the PRO version. Thinking I would work around this, I was going to set up the PRO version under our office IT administrator account (which it probably should be anyway), then share it with my personal email, but this did not avert it. When I sync, it still gives me the file:/// address. I would like to at least understand how this is supposed to work so that perhaps we can come up with a manageable solution.
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Cheers!