Photos and files from site

Adding a photo or a video

Open the job, find the Attachments card, and tap Add photo or video. A chooser comes up headed Add to this job with three options:

• Choose from Library — something already on the phone. This is first because it is the common case: the picture was taken before anybody thought about the job.
• Take Photo — the camera, there and then.
• Record Video — the same, for a clip.

Pick one and the app takes it from there. Nothing else is asked — no title, no description, no category. A photograph of the failed part is the whole of what it is for.

What you see while it sends

The button turns into a row in the same place, and the row is the only thing on screen that changes. It never blocks the job — you can carry on reading it, or close the app entirely.

• Preparing… — "Shrinking this so it will send over mobile data." The app resizes a photo and re-encodes a clip before sending it, which on a long 4K video and an older phone can take tens of seconds. That is why it is a stage of its own rather than being hidden behind a 0%.
• Uploading 43% — "You can leave this screen — it will keep going." That sentence is literal. The send is handed to the phone's own transfer service, so putting the phone in your pocket, locking it, or switching to another app does not stop it.

When it finishes, the file is on the job. There is no confirmation to dismiss — the attachment simply appears in the card.

When a send is interrupted

The row stays where it is and says what went wrong, in the office system's own words where there are any, with the useful answers beside it. It is not an alert: an alert has to be dismissed to be read past, and dismissing it would be the end of the file.

• Try again — re-sends the file that was already prepared. This is the one to press after losing signal in a basement; nothing is re-encoded, so it starts from where a fresh send would.
• Discard — gives up on it and puts the Add photo or video button back.
• Choose another — shown instead of the other two when it was the preparing step that failed. That means the file itself is the problem and sending it again would fail the same way, so the app takes you straight back to the picker.

An interrupted send starts again from the beginning. It is one transfer, not a resumable one, so a clip that died at 90% has 90% to do again. On a marginal connection it is worth sending the photograph first and the video when you are back in range.

"That file is too large"

The limit for a technician is 100 MB per file, after the app has shrunk it — which is roughly a minute and a half of video. Photographs never come close. If a clip is over it, the answer is a shorter clip rather than a second attempt at the same one.

What the office sees

The file lands on the job, in the same place as everything else attached to it: the photographs that came in with the original email, whatever the customer added through their portal link, and anything the office attached from the board. Nobody has to know which door a file came in by.

If the same file arrives twice — a technician sends a photo they had already emailed in, say — it is stored once. WorkOrders recognises it and does not keep a second copy.

If there is no button

Add photo or video is drawn only where there is somewhere to send the file to. A job with attachments already on it still shows them; what is absent is the button, rather than a button that would fail. If your crew cannot see it and you expected them to, that is the thing to ask about — not a setting on the phone.

Files can always be added from the job page on the website, by anyone on your team, and by customers through their own portal link. See a work order, start to finish.