Tag a Spot

Tag a spot is a productivity app that allows to use the iPhone camera as a tool on the field to annotate, document, and organize photos in a structured way in order to facilitate communication of such visual information between users and integration of data into external databases and workflows.

This might be useful in a wide range of situations which might or might not require geo-localization. Just a few examples:

A City Council might use tagged photos collected through iPhones by its personnel to identify equipment that requires repairing service or whatever maintainance work through a given route. These tagged photos might be merged using whichever proprietary software they might use* to generate digital reports for employees in order to perform the actual maintainance tasks.

As an option, Town citizens might be enforced to use the app to report about any issue that needs to be addressed related to a given spot (for instance a traffic light that doesn’t work or some similar problem). The user takes a shot, drags one or several colour tags over the photo, taps on each tap to add a description of the particular spot that needs to be highlighted and adds a text comment about the photo or the particular situation. Automatically, the app gathers the location where the photo was taken. Then the user might send an e-mail automatically generated by the app with this tagged photo as an attachment with all of the text description and location data if the user allowed the device to record it.

Another example: A professional working for an insurance company who goes to the workshops to check damaged parts of a car might use the tool to take a series of shots which might be documented in a structured way and sent to a central data repository of the company where the digital information could be collected as a part of a company’s workflow.

Or a professional that leads a team of employees and needs to send them a duty report about some work in a visual way. In addition, in a Real State business the options are also quite straight-forward.

Or perhaps a professional photographer or video professional who uses the iphone as an auxiliary tool to document the shots he or she has taken (for instance identifying “who is who” in a photo).

Or in film recording, the tool might be used as a way to document scene continuity or identifying location spots for film recording.

Another case of use example might be for a doctor office, let’s say a dermathologist or traumatologist, who uses the tool to document the evolution of some visual information through different patient appointments. Options are endless. The iPhone camera is so crisp that the application might be used even to annotate shots of paper documents as a hand-held scanner.

In Tag-a-spot, photos are organized as ‘projects’ each one containing an unlimited number of shots (limited of course by disk capacity). After a photo has been taken the user can drag any number of tags as color dots which can be dragged freely over the photo to mark the areas in the photos that might require specific attention. A text description can be associated to each tag and a long text comment might be associated to each photo. If the user has geolocalization activated on the device, the position where the shot is taken is recorded as well automatically or it can be adjusted manually as well to fine-tune the precise location and scale on a map. Besides photos taken by the iPhone camera, exisiting photos in the iPhone Photo Library might be incorporated to the projects for tagging and commenting. Every original photo might be optionally saved into the Photo Library either at full resolution or at a reduced size to save disk space.

In addition to sending photos by e-mail, users might save them into a computer by connecting the iPhone to it. Photos might be seen in iTunes in the user’s document folder of the application and saved to local repositories. Through XML data might be synchronized between the iPhone or several iPhones used to collect data and a central ad-hoc application that the organization or professional might use in their workflow processes.

* Tag a Spot exports data in XML including paths to low resolution tagged photos and the original ones, saved separately for each project.

About the developer:

Jordi Vilà is an independent developer and consultant based in Barcelona. He has been involved in Apple related projects for over 25 years and has also worked at Apple in Northern California as a Senior Software Engineer.

For feedback, support, bug reporting, suggestions and enquiries either for this app or others, you might contact us at: vilasoft@me.com

This app was designed for the iPhone and for iOS 5+

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