When you joined Land Surveyors United, a unique "Add By Phone" email address was assigned to your Profile on the network. You can use this address to send photos or videos, one at a time, to your profile on LSU.  If Twitter is enabled on your profile, you can also post Add By Phone content to Twitter by checking the box. If your cell phone has a camera and email, this is a great way to add photos or videos to your network while on the go!  Any photo or video you send in to your unique Add By Phone email address will be added to the network and attributed to you.  See below for a geolocation trick...

Below is an example (your email address is unique to you and should be kept private):

When you send in photos or videos using this address the subject of your email becomes the title of the photo or video and any text in the body of the email will be added as the description.  The subject will show up in your Tweet if you elect to post to Twitter.

Never Lose a Survey Marker Again!

This is a theory that I'd like to test.  The other night, I was discussing a problem known all to well by any land surveyor- keeping track of monument locations.   Well we've developed a work around which should work for most modern mobile phones, in just 3 steps.  

First, check to see if your phone has the option of adding a geolocation to photos that you take in the field.  If so, play around with the accuracy and proximity to actual location settings and take a few photos of monuments or benchmarks the the field, attaching this geolocation to the exif data of the photos you took.  

Next, send those photos to your profile using the options outlined above, which should carry with it the location of the photos you just took and uploaded.   

Next, log into LSU when you get to a computer and go to your photos, grouping those newly uploaded images into an album, giving it a title such as "Construction Site John Island", for example. Tag that album with subject titles such as the state or town the project was in, the name of the jobsite etc.  

By grouping a set of mobile geolocated photos of markers on a particular project together into an album, you will not only have created a nice set of reference data to refer to as needed in the future, you will have also created a piece of valuable information for the next surveyor who comes along to work off of.

If enough of us would do this sort of thing, eventually we'd have a HUGE database of known points with visual reference data which could be searched by country, state, city, etc.  Think BIG when providing information for surveyors in the future.   What do you think? Will you try it?