Media Capture Questions in CommCare

It is possible to capture Images, audio, and video on CommCare for Android devices. See the Form Builder page for details on how to add the appropriate type of question. 

Using Multimedia Capture Questions

Image Capture

When you get to a screen with an image capture question you will have the option of either capturing the data in real time (i.e. opening a camera app to take a picture) or choosing a file from you phone (i.e. navigating to a folder on your device to find a specific file).

Widget Options 

By default, users will be able to either record multimedia live, or will be able to choose an existing piece of multimedia to attach.

In order to require that the multimedia be captured live, the Appearance Attribute for the question in the form builder can be set to acquire. This will remove the ability to select an existing file.



Additionally, if you have selected the incorrect file to upload to the application, you can click the Clear button to clear the current selection. This is a default option for the multimedia question type, as displayed below:

Downloading Captured Media Files

Accessing individual files

Capture media files are available from the Submit History report on the CommCareHQ Reports tab:

1. Go to the Reports tab and apply the filters to the Submit History Report

2. Find the form submission of interest and click on "open form"

3. Click on the tab that says "Attachments" and you will see a .jpg file that you can click on and download:

Downloading Captured Media Files in Bulk

You can also download all of the media files attached with a form from the Form Data Export page on CommCareHQ:

Any form with associated files will have a Download button accessible.

NOTE: Bulk multimedia exports support only up to 5 GB of data. Please see this help page for common errors encountered if your file size exceeds 5 GB



Linking Media Files with Form Exports

For more information please on linking the files and naming conventions see Form Data Export.

Considerations for Using Multimedia Capture

Users should not capture very large files because these may cause form submission to become blocked in areas with poor connectivity. 

Anything greater than 1MB could cause issues including slow syncing and failure to upload the picture to CCHQ. BE SURE TO TEST THIS EXTENSIVELY IN LOW-CONNECTIVITY SETTINGS. The more rural/remote you get, the greater chance that submitting images will be an untenable workflow because the network is too bad. The best rule of thumb is to use a small (< 1MB) file size when taking pictures within CC.  VGA files seem to work particularly well.  You may have to manually adjust this in your camera app if you prefer to take larger size pictures outside of CommCare. If you are looking at a report in CCHQ and you either can't find an image you know you captured, or you see an image file name but it is not linked to anything, make sure that you did not take a very large image that could not be submitted over the network.