Short answer

Yes, you can use them, but they almost certainly will not place themselves on the map. Automatic placement depends on GPS coordinates saved inside the photo, and photos taken before you switched camera location tagging on do not have them. The route for an existing photo is to drop the pin yourself on the map, set the asset type, attach the photo, and then run AI Classify on the record. You get the same asset, it just takes a few more seconds each.

Detail

The automatic route reads the GPS coordinates embedded in the photo and drops the asset at that point, then names, describes and condition-rates it from the image. Take that away and you are placing the asset by hand, which is still perfectly workable if you know where the thing is.

To use a photo you already have:

  1. Open the map and drop a point where the asset actually is.
  2. Set the asset type and the location tag. If the point falls inside an area you have already drawn, the location tag comes from the area.
  3. Attach the photo to the record.
  4. Press AI Classify on the asset record, which runs the same AI pass on the attached photo and proposes a type, description and condition. In the assets list you can select several records and use Auto Detect Assets to do it in a batch.

So you keep the AI, you keep the photo, and what you lose is the automatic positioning. On a scattered estate that positioning is most of the value, so it is usually worth walking the route with the camera set up properly. On a handful of assets whose location you know perfectly well, using what you have is the sensible call.

Watch-outs

  • 🔴 Sending a photo to yourself strips the location out of it. Email, WhatsApp and Teams all remove the GPS metadata, on every device. So a photo that genuinely was taken with location on will still arrive at the office with nothing in it if somebody emailed it over. Move photos by OneDrive, Google Drive, AirDrop or a USB cable instead.
  • You can test a photo rather than guess. Upload one and see. If the GPS is missing, Civic.ly tells you straight away that no location was found, so you know before you commit a batch.
  • Screenshots never carry GPS. Neither does a photo of a photo, or anything that has been through an editor.
  • Check the AI's suggestion, do not accept it. That applies to every asset however it was created, but especially here: the AI is working from a photo that may be old, taken in different light, or framed to show a fault rather than the asset.
  • A photo taken indoors is a poor candidate either way. GPS is unreliable inside buildings, so those assets tend to need placing by hand regardless of when the photo was taken.