I’ve talked a few times about the APPHACK held at AU 2012, as well as posting a photo of the contestants.
One of the drivers behind this APPHACK – as well as the one that was held internally to Autodesk which resulted in the creation of apps such as the excellent “QR Codes” by my friend John Beltran – was to encourage development of apps for hosting in the Autodesk Exchange store.
The first of the winning entries has now made it up to Exchange: PhotoGeoDWG from CAD Management Resources Inc. – the second place winner – is now available for AutoCAD 2013 (as Shaan has already mentioned over on his blog). It’s also available for AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013, in case you’re using those products.
This is a cool (and free!) app to help manage photos alongside CAD data. Here’s the app’s description from Autodesk Exchange:
Have you ever taken a bunch of existing conditions photos and after returning to the office wonder where and even why you took the picture? PhotoGeoDWG will help you manage those existing conditions photos by geolocating them in Google Maps and inserting camera markers into your CAD file. Build albums, automatically import camera markers hyperlinked with the location of the photo image file. Right click a photo name and zoom to the x-y location in your drawing. Click on the photo name and see it displayed conveniently in the palette, or insert the photo directly into the CAD file to better communicate to your field crew.
The app’s UI is implemented via an AutoCAD palette, shown here on the right.
You can use it to locate the real-world condition in Google Maps that you’d like to document photographically, select the image you wish to use to do so – whether on the local system or up in Autodesk 360 – and then place a marker inside the current drawing. This marker connects back to your raster-based documentation (which you can also choose to insert directly into the DWG, should that make sense).
This all seems to be very interesting functionality for people managing geo-locatable, real-world assets alongside corresponding CAD data. Check it out! :-)