Near real-time snaps

At last we have solved the challenge of transmitting photos from the field to the decision makers in the Group Emergency Co-ordination Centre. We've had the components for a while now but have finally put them together. Here's how it works...

The Ricoh Caplio 500SE camera has a GPS unit mounted on the hot shoe. This means that when we take photos outside we get a GPS fix embedded in the photo tag. The camera has bluetooth capability and can send the photos as they are taken to a computer that is nearby.

We've partnered the camera with an Asus eeePC which is a very small, lightweight, solid state laptop. We've connected a vodem to the laptop to get us on the internet whilst in the field. The laptop has Microsoft Groove 2007 running on it (as do all our EM PCs).

So... as we take a photo, we press OK to send a copy of the photo by bluetooth to the laptop. The folder that the photo ends up in has been set up to synchronise via Groove. You can invite as many Groove contacts as you like to share the folder but I would limit that list. At the moment we only use one other computer in the ECC to receive images.

Once in the ECC we copy the images out to another folder (to prevent circular synchronisation) and then process the photos using the software that comes with the camera. GPS Photolink takes each photo with a GPS location embedded in it and creates a number of user determined outputs including GIS, web and Google Earth outputs as well as watermarked photos (like that above). This means that within a few minutes of the photos being taken, we can see where it was taken plus the photo itself.

We'll be demonstrating this process at the conference next month in Rotorua along with some more info on Groove as an ECC/EOC collaboration tool.