To gain full advantage of innovations in technology, the construction industry must sometimes appropriate technology that was not developed specifically for construction. Visolu, a photo management app, is one such technology.

Image courtesy of Underground Imaging Technologies

Berlin-based Pixolution uses visual-image compression to find, sort and simultaneously display thousands of photos on most mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, Android). Visolu can arrange the photos in a list view, a grid view or a color view, which groups photos by visual similarity and ends up looking like a pointillist painting by Seurat.

Among other applications, construction managers could employ Visolu to find, for example, a specific progress photo for site documentation, rather than sort through thousands of photos.

When testing Visolu, ENR searched for photos of a particular engineer against a white background. Results were automatically grouped together from several folders and displayed on-screen, separate from hundreds of dissimilar photos.

Visolu is limited by the processor speed of the host device. Several user reviews on the Mac App Store site said Visolu ran slowly when handling thousands of photos.

Pixolution CEO Kai Barthel says, “[An upcoming version] will have enhanced perspective mapping to increase the ease of photo navigation.” In other words, you'll be able to see more photos on one screen and from different perspectives. The new version should be out by July, Barthel says.