Where are the photos from the survey stored?

Hi Joseph,
The photos are stored in c:\Users\YOUR_USER\OpenForis\Collect\data\collect_upload or ~/OpenForis/Collect/data/collect_upload if you are using Linux or MacOS.
They are grouped by survey (one folder named with the id of the survey for each survey) and by attribute (one folder with the id of the attribute for every file attribute in the survey).
In this way you can have all the pictures taken for all the "plots" in your survey inside a single folder. If you want to match the file name with other information, you can export the data to csv or Excel; there will be a column with the file name.
The name of the uploaded file is not the original one, but it's automatically generated by Collect to make it unique.
I hope it's a bit more clear now, many thanks.
Open Foris Team

Dear Sabrina,
When you export the data to CSV/Excel format, the photos cannot be included in the generated files, but if you export the data in Collect format (.collect-data extension) the photos will be included in the exported file and you can import that file into another installation of Collect, if you need.
Many thanks,
Open Foris Team

The question still remains to where or how the photos are stored after loading into OFCollect; do they need to be part of each backup, that would involve series of considerable (redundant) data storage. It would be nice of the photos can be downloaded (also for other use) leaving only a link in the record. Joseph

It would also be nice if Open Foris could allow to define a custom folder for the location of images (and without complicate subfolders, but just all images in the selected custom folder). I personnally move all images manually from the weird Open Foris repository to a custom repository on by D (data) drive, which is backed up while my C: drive is not. I am also not using Open Foris to store the data but only to transit them to my custom local database. Another issue with images management: When Open Foris rename the images with their uuid names, it seems that all the image exif data are lost, including the datetime. This is really not great. I don't know if this is something that is planned to be corrected?

Dear Bruno,
We haven't finalized yet the screen to customize the uploaded images/files path, but it will come soon.
The only way you can do it now is by adding a row in the DB table "ofc_config", specifying in the column "key" the value "upload_path", and in the column "value" specify the absolute path you want to use to store the files.
Why do you think that the repository is weird? The files are grouped by survey id and file attribute internal id, just to avoid having them all in a single folder...
We are working to the EXIF data lost too, please have a look to the changelog file when we will release new versions to check if the issue has been solved.
Many thanks,
Open Foris Team

Dear Open Foris Team, Thanks a lot for your comments. The reason the repository for images storage appears weird to me is because the subfolders' organization based on ids is not easy to read, as those ids are not meaningful to me (I don't know which id corresponds to which survey, etc.). I guess the main reason behind is because I am not using Open Foris as my database but only as a transit to a MS Access database. This in turn is just because I found more easy to use MS Access, and I know exactly where my files are on my D drive, and my backup (while Open Foris is on my C:/Users/MyName/..., i.e. a place that I normally do not backup as part of my weekly routine). I also found more easy to have all my Open Foris images in a single folder (I don't know if there is a downside to that?), and to manage the data about these images (survey, survey items, etc.) in database tables. If you have any tutorial (other than the handbook) on how to use Open Foris Collect as a database, for data manipulation and database curation aspects, I would be interested to have the links. Cheers