Picturing Success with Photos and painting the way forward!

Robert Dean

My team and I have been loving the versatility of smartsheet and the feature rich environment it provides, but I do find one area where I am hearing the same wishlist item from my team on a weekly basis, and it's not just my team. It seems there are many other teams and individuals who are looking for more ways to work with photos in sheets.

Let's get into the details shall we? and then the solution!

When adding photos into smartsheet we've got a few ways of going about this. Adding attachments or embedding photos in a cell. My team very much prefers the latter since when we are collaborating on a large project with many individuals and teams alike it is key that the photos are easily visible without "death by a thousand clicks", we've all been there. I want to do " x " and to get to " X " I need to open this page, and then navigate this menu, then select this option to do this thing, great! now I need to do that 100 more times.

Smartsheet has the ability to add these embedded photos, but I am seeking a more streamlined and user-friendly approach to avoid "death by a thousand clicks". Most of the users I interact with are operating using the mobile client, and we typically have 2 scenarios for both admins and workers

1. Adding new items
2. Adding photos to existing items

With Adding new photos, a column type for "Photos" would be a big step towards taking advantage of smartsheets existing features in a new and more accessible way since this could be used in the forms that smartsheet has available, whereas right now there isn't a way to add photos into cells when using forms. This to me and my team would make adding new items when operating in the field so much easier. And the second advantage I see for desktop users would be "Drag and Drop Photos".

If the Photo column type is set up to embed photos in the cell then this would allow for users to drag and drop photos on the computer instead of going one by one clicking the "Insert image" button and then searching through the folders for the picture and uploading. This is the primary source of my "death by a thousand clicks" dilemma and one that I can see so easily remedied by smartsheets existing architecture.

What are your thoughts and experiences? My goal is to drive more discussion about how photos have been used in your projects and how you think this idea could be implemented and benefit your teams and individual projects.

Let's Picture a future where we can show the work, we do without adding more work!