Photos

Photos is the project's picture library: progress shots, defects, deliveries, conditions on the day. It is one of the few records on a construction project that nobody argues with later, which is why it is worth a little discipline at the point of upload rather than a lot of archaeology afterwards.

Albums

Photos are organised into albums, which nest, so a structure like Progress, then Level 3, then Week 42 is a normal thing to build. Photos can also sit at the top level with no album at all.

You navigate albums by breadcrumb, drag photos between them, and move or copy a selection in one go. Getting the structure roughly right at the start of a job is worth more than tidying it later, for the same reason it is worth it in Documents: once there are four thousand photographs, nobody reorganises anything.

Adding photos

Upload takes files from your computer or your phone's camera roll, including a drag and drop straight onto an album.

There is also a capture option that opens the device camera in Teralo and takes the photo directly into the album you are looking at, which is the one to use on site.

What Teralo reads off a photo

Teralo reads the photo's own metadata as it is uploaded, so a photograph arrives carrying facts nobody had to type:

• The date it was taken, from the camera rather than from the upload time. This is the important one, because a batch uploaded on Friday keeps Tuesday's date.
• GPS coordinates, where the camera recorded them.
• The camera make and model, and its settings.

On top of that you add a description and tags. Those are the two fields that make a photo findable in a year, and the search covers them.

Sort the gallery by name, date taken, modified or size, and search across the library from the box at the top.

Photos in the rest of Teralo

Photos is the store rather than a silo. The same library is what the attachment picker offers everywhere else, so a photo can be attached to a site diary entry, an inspection item, an observation, an incident, a permit or a piece of mail.

It runs the other way too. A photo uploaded directly onto a diary entry is stored as a project photo, so it appears in the library alongside everything else rather than being buried in one day's record.

Downloading

Single photos download from the preview. A selection downloads as a batch, which is what a monthly client report or a handover pack is actually assembled from.

SettingsHost only

Photos has no Tools settings page at either level, because there is nothing to configure: albums are made as you need them and everything else about a photo comes from the file or from you.

Whether the tool appears at all comes from the reader's permission template, and above that from whether the organisation's plan includes it. There is no per-project switch for a tool anywhere in Teralo. See The tools catalogue.

PermissionsHost only

Four permissions, and the split between them is worth reading before granting.

Viewing covers photos and albums. Uploading is separate, so a client or a certifier can be given the library to look at without being able to add to it.

Managing covers photos, albums and settings, which is the permission for whoever keeps the structure sensible. Deleting is separate again and is the one to be careful with. A photograph is the only evidence of a thing that was covered up the next day, and there is no revision history to recover it from.

See How permissions work.