Find the scan, then open it
I spent twenty minutes last month looking for a scan I knew we had.
I knew roughly when it was captured and roughly where the site was. I did not know the file name, because the file name was something like Scan_Final_2, and I did not know which drive it was on, because point clouds end up wherever there was room at the time.
Twenty minutes to find a file we already owned.
Why they hide so well
A drawing tells you something from its name. A scan usually does not. There is no thumbnail, and two captures of the same intersection a year apart can have names that look nothing alike, neither one mentioning the intersection.
Then there is the split. Some scans sit on local drives and some sit in Autodesk Forma, and the two do not share a search box. Whichever we check first, we are looking at half of what we have.
Nine ways in
So the inventory walks both sides and fills a table live while it scans. The part that saves the twenty minutes is what sits above that table.
- Search, across name, path, hub, project, category and coordinate system at once.
- Source, cloud or local.
- Project, from the hub the file was found in.
- Category, our own tag, which gets its own section below.
- State, county and city, three filters, read from where the scan actually sits on the earth.
- Size, on a slider, because "the big one" is a real memory and often the only one.
- Hide corrupt, to drop the known unreadable files out of the way
Every column sorts too, path and modified date included.
Why so many? Because we never remember the same thing twice. One day it is the county. The next it is that it was the four gigabyte one from the job in March. Any single handle cuts a few hundred rows down to a few.
The map is a filter too
The pins come out of the files. Each project carries the coordinate system it was captured in, so the inventory reads that, reprojects it, and drops a marker.
The map only shows what the filters left, and clicking a pin highlights the row. I use this more than I expected to. Where it was turns out to be what we remember best once the name and the date are gone.
Tags, because the file has no opinion
Nothing in the format says survey, or as-built, or "that scan we never used." So the category is ours to assign, and it persists across rescans, keyed to the file's identity rather than to where it was sitting that day. Untagged rows get a keyword guess so the column is never empty on the first pass.
That one column is the difference between a list of files and an inventory.
Then open it, from the row
Here is the part that matters most, and it is the smallest part of the app.
Every row has an open button. Press it on a local file and ReCap comes up with that scan loaded. Press it on a cloud file and its location in Forma opens instead, since there is nothing on disk to hand over.
No copying a path. No pasting it into a dialog. No going back to the table to check whether it was the one in the archive folder.
A search that ends in a file path is not finished. It has handed us a homework assignment. Finding the thing was only ever in service of opening the thing, and if those are two separate chores then the tool did half its job.
Be Better - Finding it is only half the job.