Construction Paper

Windows · pipeline environmental inspection

Tools for inspectors. Built by inspectors.

Not outsourced, made here, by someone who does the job.

Name a day's photos by station. Stamp them with where they were taken. Send the day to Google Earth. Lay stationing down the line, pull features out into layers, and put the crews on the map from the scatter sheet. It runs from its own folder on a truck laptop, and does not need the internet while you work.

From the right-of-way to named files Yule Avdat, an inspector in a hi-vis vest, photographs a pipeline right-of-way. The view tilts to a map, where the right-of-way edges, a workspace boundary, a wetland, a stream, station ticks and camera pins draw themselves. The map then lands on a laptop in a truck cab, listing photos renamed with their station numbers and a Google Earth KMZ for the day. 2208+00 2209+00 2207+00 2208+00 2209+00 2210+00 2208+00 Workspace Wetland Right-of-way N Renamed IMG_0142.JPG 2208+00_These Big Jobs - Spread I_IMG_0142.JPG IMG_0143.JPG 2208+00_These Big Jobs - Spread I_IMG_0143.JPG IMG_0144.JPG 2209+00_These Big Jobs - Spread I_IMG_0144.JPG Google Earth → 9-9-26.kmz
  • 01The GPS in the photo
  • 02The nearest station in your KMZ
  • 03The station in front of the name
  • 2208+00_These Big Jobs - Spread I_IMG_0142.JPG
  • 2208+00_These Big Jobs - Spread I_IMG_0143.JPG
  • 2209+00_These Big Jobs - Spread I_IMG_0144.JPG
  • 9-9-26.kmz

What it does

Rename by station

Reads the GPS out of each photo, finds the nearest station point in your KMZ, and writes a name you can sort — station, project, original filename. Videos too, on a machine that has ffmpeg installed.

Marco Polocator

Burns location, bearing, date and a caption onto the image itself, so the photo still says where it was taken after it has been mailed, pasted into a report and printed.

Paper Airplane

Opens a drone clip and reads the flight out of the clip itself, so where the aircraft went goes to Google Earth. Pause it, pick what you are marking — silt fence, filter bag, blanket — and click it on the frame: each click lands on the ground where that thing is, and the marks come out as a KMZ for the spread.

Google Earth KMZ

Exports the day as a KMZ, one file for each folder of photos, named after the folder. Every photo becomes a pin with a cone showing which way the camera was pointed — and just the pin, with no cone, where the phone recorded no heading. Click one and the photo opens in the balloon. Send it and the other person sees what you saw.

Stale GPS caught

A plausibility check catches coordinates that could not be right — usually a hot phone that stopped reacquiring GPS and stamped the photo with its last known fix. The suspect photos turn red in the preview, with the reason, before anything is renamed.

Portable

One executable and no installer. Settings, layers, profiles and tile cache live beside it, so it runs from a truck laptop and leaves the rest of the machine alone. The key binds to the first computer it opens on.

Who it is for

Inspectors who use photographs in their reporting. Anyone whose day ends with a full camera card and a report to write.