I have an android (pixel) phone with a good camera. Is there some way to directly load the pictures on my google photos app directly into a report. I do my reports on my laptop and have google photos there as well but when I hit upload files inside the ms report google photos is not one of the choices. I would like to avoid the additional steps to save the photos to another file on my computer if possible.
Another issue I have is with receipt photos from my phone not being clear. These are mainly an issue with the post office shops. They look clear to me but blurry to them.

Not sure about the moving to google photos, but here is what I do. I do the entire report (usually Sassie) from a laptop/desktop. Then I use my phone and login to upload directly from my phone. It's not that much of a hassle. It beats emailing myself the pictures and then downloading/saving/naming them. I just upload off the phone directly into the report. I just don't like answering all the yes/no and narratives on the phone.

Sometimes I simply enter the entire shop via the phone, including photos. I like doing that while in the field, so I dont have a lot of shops to enter when I get home. If it is a long shop form with lots of narrative, I do as hbbigdaddy does.

My son had a Pixel, I don't remember which version. I don't remember if it was a 3 or 4?? Anyway, he really liked his Pixel. He had no trouble at all completing his jobs out in the field and uploading his pictures directly from his phone. I don't know if there was a special process because, he never said he had a problem. I know we had issues every time we loaded his pictures on the computer, which we really didn't do as often as we should have. But he never had a problem uploading pics into surveys with it. And since LG is no longer making phones, my choices for a newer model phone are very limited, I'm considering getting a Pixel to avoid going back to Samsung. It's not that I don't like Samsung, I just feel very strongly about their lack of competition..

I have both Crapple and Samsung. I use my Samsung for the shops/timing. I had that Ultrachon Lite app (free) that allowed mutliple laps and then I could email the results so they would be saved if I had to refer back to them. I found 1 app on Crapple and did not like it that much, so I stopped using it.

Well, I thought there must be some way to grab the photos out of google photos on the laptop and I just did not know how to do it. It looks as though there is not. I guess I should send a note to google or microsoft or hp or someone and suggest it. My photos automatically upload from my phone google photos to my computer google photos. But from there I have to do the few extras steps. I will try to finish my reports on my phone but that seems just as much work to find and open the app as it is to just load the google photo to my mystery shop scans file.
By the way I do like my pixel phone but it is much smaller and sleeker than the other brands. It seems the trend now is larger and larger phones after years of everyone wanting smaller and smaller phones. It is also much more difficult to find anyone who knows anything about the pixel if you need help. When I first got my phone many had never heard of it but since the 6 came out they have been doing a lot more advertising.

I use the MS free app called OneDrive which i believe does what you want. My phone pics are automatically loaded to the cloud and then are avail on my PC. I don't need to transfer the photos.

I also use another free app to scan my receipts. Its called Genius Scan. Receipts are always super clear. It lets me save the scan to my photos and they are then avail vis OneDrive on my PC.

Kenash, I will have to look into this as it sounds as tho it is a solution. I have one drive and google drive but I need to figure out how to sync them. The msc reports software does not list google anything when I try to load photos.

Sandy

Every report i have ever done on my PC will ask me where the pic is located and then I can go to the directory and file. OneDrive creates a new directory on your PC and you just need to navigate to that location.

"Crapple." Thanks for the giggles!

@hbbigdaddy wrote:

I have both Crapple and Samsung. I use my Samsung for the shops/timing. I had that Ultrachon Lite app (free) that allowed mutliple laps and then I could email the results so they would be saved if I had to refer back to them. I found 1 app on Crapple and did not like it that much, so I stopped using it.

Check your "back-up" and "sync" settings on your phone. You should be able to login to your google account from any device and have access to images and docs that were downloaded via your phone.

I have a Samsung android phone. In the camera, after you've taken a picture, click on the circle with a thumbnail of the picture you've just taken. The picture will expand to fill the screen. Below will be a heart, a pencil, and what sort of looks like an inverted v going to the right. The V, when you click on it, should offer the option to upload to Google photos. (There are multiple options including attaching to email, Gmail, Facebook and others for quick shares to social media.) It's a great feature to know.

My camera in my phone automatically uploads to Google photos on my laptop. What I was asking is if there is a way to grab the photos directly from google photos when I am doing a report on my laptop and put them into a report instead of having to take another step to transfer them to a file in my computer and name them.
But thanks for the tips on how to handle them when I have just taken the photo.
As to my other issue with receipt photos that are deemed blurry, it might just be the one editor from my post office shops but she sends them back every time...hence my score has dropped from a solid 10 to a solid 9 since she seems to be my editor almost always. Does anyone who takes photos of receipts have tips?

The key to taking sharp photos is to brace your arms / shoulders / body. If you are standing, hold your upper arms against your body and bend your elbows. If you are close to a wall or a car or whatever, brace your arm against the wall or car. If you are sitting, rest your elbows on the table or counter and bend your elbows. SUPPORT is the key to sharp photos. Also, short exposures which translates (generally) to good lighting.

@sandyf wrote:

Does anyone who takes photos of receipts have tips?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2022 08:29PM by myst4au.

Sandy,

My Samsung tablet and my son's Samsung phone have a document scan feature in the camera. It works very very well for taking pictures of receipts especially the Post Office receipts and it doesn't require any cropping or or adjusting the pictures or anything afterwards.

On my handy dandy LG phone the best I can do is hold the phone very straight and very still and take the picture. Then crop picture so that a) of the background is gone, then it clears it up for some reason and I don't know why it suddenly becomes legible when it's cropped so that all you can see is the receipt.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2022 08:23PM by Morledzep.

Morledzep, do you cut the receipt in half to scan it from your phone the way they show in the example? I have scan as well and tried that and it did not look as clear as just taking a photo of the receipt. I tend to think it might be just this one editor who seems to do 90% of my reports. They look nice to me once I add the pop and sharpen on my phone and a bit of contrast. Many of these receipts are not printed with dark ink. I end up scanning them into my computer using my all in one printer but that is yet another long step.

@sandyf wrote:

Morledzep, do you cut the receipt in half to scan it from your phone the way they show in the example? I have scan as well and tried that and it did not look as clear as just taking a photo of the receipt. I tend to think it might be just this one editor who seems to do 90% of my reports. They look nice to me once I add the pop and sharpen on my phone and a bit of contrast. Many of these receipts are not printed with dark ink. I end up scanning them into my computer using my all in one printer but that is yet another long step.

Not anymore.. I take a single picture of the entire intact receipt. I used to cut them in half and scan them on my printer because they were too long for the printer. And when I 1st started doing the shops on mobiaudit, I took 2 separate pics and uploaded them both. Then last year they said that the receipt had to be in a single picture (even though a scheduler or an editor at the MSC is who told me that I could take 2 pics as long as they could see the entire receipt) and I don't have any way of cutting them in half and laying the pieces side-by-side to take a picture of them in my Jeep, So I just started taking pictures of the entire receipt intact and cropping it to show just the receipt. And then I got this fancy tablet, now I just take a picture of the receipt with the scan function.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2022 06:35AM by Morledzep.

Sandy, I used to do what you do; that is, download my photos taken with my phone to my hard drive in order to upload the photos to my reports. I kept thinking there must be a way to load them directly from my phone's camera roll to the reports, but I couldn't figure it out. Then, voila! Last week I did it. But now I can't remember what I did.... I think I dropped the photos into a library folder in Google photos. instead of just leaving them organized and synced by day. Or something. LOL. I just know that I didn't have to go through the extra step, but I wasn't really paying attention to the path I took to get to the photos. Sigh.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2022 04:21PM by BirdyC.

I transfer pics from my LG (Android) to my laptop via bluetooth. The laptop folder is called "Shops." When I need to select photos for the reports, this folder is automatically selected and the files are sorted by date.

Birdy you are not alone. I try to learn everything by trial and error and not just on the computer and then, like you, when it finally works I wonder exactly what I did to get there. If you figure it out again let me know.

@BirdyC wrote:

Sandy, I used to do what you do; that is, download my photos taken with my phone to my hard drive in order to upload the photos to my reports. I kept thinking there must be a way to load them directly from my phone's cameral roll to the reports, but I couldn't figure it out. Then, voila! Last week I did it. But now I can't remember what I did.... I think I dropped the photos into a library folder in Google photos. instead of just leaving them organized and synced by day. Or something. LOL. I just know that I didn't have to go through the extra step, but I wasn't really paying attention to the path I took to get to the photos. Sigh.

Hi Honny, I need a step by step...so you take the photo with your phone and then your next step is? In my case the photo goes into my google photos on my phone and then eventually it shows up on google photos on my computer...Then? make sure bluetooth is turned on and then can I send it from the phone to my "shops" file in my computer somehow? How? What I have been doing is waiting for it to show up on my laptop google photos and then I find if I put the photo in edit mode I can save as a pdf. Otherwise it saves as a webpage? But I would love to skip those extra steps and also naming. In many cases I would like to save it anyway just in case. But sometimes I would like to just grab it out of google photos where it is large enough to make sure I have the right one and send it directly to the report.
I do have an interesting story though about these photos...so I mailed a package to my daughter 3 day priority on the 11th using a shop. On the 18th I flew to where she lives and she had not yet received it. Today again it did not arrive. I opened my photos and was able to find the tracking number on the receipt even though I am 1500 miles away from home where the actual receipt is and found that my poor package traveled from LA to Austin, out for delivery, back to Austin po , then to Houston , then back to Austin and then back to LA. The reason given in the tracking was because the address was incomplete. So I looked at my photo of my package. Who else but a mystery shopper would have a photo of their package? And the address was absolutely correct. I was sitting at the destination of the package and checked the door to see if it was the correct address and it was. I wonder if they will reimburse me for 3 day postage and send the package out again when I arrive home? Tomorrow is the intended delivery day back to my house so I am hoping informed delivery will show me what the address looks like now. Maybe some other package leaked on it and messed it up. Thank goodness for modern technology so I can see all of this.

@HonnyBrown wrote:

I transfer pics from my LG (Android) to my laptop via bluetooth. The laptop folder is called "Shops." When I need to select photos for the reports, this folder is automatically selected and the files are sorted by date.