GeoProof

GPS Photo Proof for Land Surveyors

You recover a monument in a hedgerow, note it, and move on. Two years later somebody has to find that same iron pipe again — a colleague, a client's contractor, or you, with no memory of the day. The field notes say "rebar with cap, at fence corner". The photo shows a rebar with a cap, and a fence, and gives no clue which fence, on which parcel, in which year.

For land surveyors and survey crews

What a bare photo cannot carry

Monument recovery, years apart. A photograph is the best record of what a marker looked like — the cap stamping, the corrosion, the disturbed ground around it. It is a poor record of where the marker was, unless something in the frame says so. Vegetation grows, fences get replaced, and the landmark you were relying on is gone by the next visit.

Handing a site to someone who has never seen it. A crew chief sends a party out to re-occupy a control point. The photo they have shows a tripod on grass. A photo carrying coordinates, a heading and the ground elevation tells them roughly where to stand and which way to look, before they burn an hour walking a field.

Set versus found. Weeks later, in the office, the difference between a monument you set and one you recovered lives in whether the notes and the photo folders stayed in step. A date and position on the face of each image keeps that straight without cross-referencing anything.

The fields that matter here

Written into the image at capture

  • Latitude and longitude, with the accuracy the handset reported
  • Altitude
  • Compass heading — the direction the camera was pointing
  • Street address, where one exists
  • Date and time, checked against a public time server rather than the device clock
  • Weather at capture, optional and off by default
  • Your firm's logo and the project or point name

Heading and altitude carry more weight on this page than on any other trade page on this site. A monument photo taken looking north from the point is a different document from one taken looking south at it, and six months later nobody remembers which they did.

Say the obvious thing plainly

A phone is not survey equipment. The coordinates GeoProof stamps come from the handset's own receiver, which works in metres, not in the tenths and hundredths your instruments deliver. Nothing here replaces a total station, a GNSS rover, or a properly reduced observation.

What a stamped photo replaces is the note: the sketch, the scribbled point number, the "third pipe along the north line". It puts a position and a date onto the picture so the picture stands on its own in the file. Treat the coordinates as a locator that gets you to the right corner of the right parcel, and take the measurement with the instrument that is built for it.

Each photo also gets a SHA-256 fingerprint at capture, so you can re-check later whether that exact file has changed since it was taken. That is a change check, and nothing more. GeoProof does not certify anything and is not a legal service.

A day in the field

  1. Set the project name once. Job number, parcel, or client name — it goes onto every frame for the rest of the day.
  2. Wide shot before the close-up. Stand back and photograph the monument in its surroundings: the fence, the tree line, the road. That is the photo somebody navigates by.
  3. The marker itself. Close enough to read the cap stamping, with the coordinates and heading in the corner of the frame.
  4. A shot along the line. Camera on the point, looking down the boundary or toward the next monument. The heading on that photo is what makes it useful rather than decorative.
  5. End of day. Export a PDF grouped by project, with your notes on each frame, and file it with the field book instead of a folder of numbered JPEGs nobody can decode.

No signal on the back forty

Position comes from satellites, so the coordinates, altitude and heading all land on the photo with no carrier signal at all — which is the normal condition on most of the parcels you work.

The street address is the exception, because turning a position into a street name means asking a server. Out of coverage you get coordinates immediately and the address is added later, once the phone reconnects. On rural work there is often no meaningful address anyway, and the coordinates are the field you actually wanted.

Nothing leaves the device

No account, no cloud, no sync. There is no server holding photographs of your clients' boundaries, because the photos never go anywhere you do not send them.

Pricing

Free to use. One-time Pro unlock. No subscription, no ads.

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