Creating Your Own Templates

Choose a template type

When creating a new template, you first have to choose a template type. Because data tables can potentially contain data in so many different ways, it would be too complex to handle all possibilities with a single template type. Hence, ImageMeter provides some basic template types that each can generate data tables of some form. Currently, there are two types: Custom templates and area-sum templates (Fig. 1).

Custom templates generate tables with one row for each image. You can define a set of tags that you can assign to elements in the image. The columns in the table are filled with the measurements from the element with the respective tag.

Area-sum templates generate one row for each element in an image. Multiple images are organized in groups below each other. This template is specialized in computing the sum of element areas, which is a common application. The area-sum template type comes with two presets ('Wall area' and 'Floor area'). Both are the same template type, but each has a different set of predefined tags for the respective application.

When choosing a template, you are taken to the root configuration of the template where you can set its name, but also can reach the screens to define its tags and the table layouts (Fig. 2). While the principles of defining tags and table layouts are similar for each template type, they are different in the details and are hence described separately in the following.

Fig. 1: select a template type when adding a new template.
Fig. 2: main template configuration screen.

Custom template

A Custom template should be used when you want to take the same set of measurements in each image and place them into the table with one row per image.

A table generated with the Custom template.

Tags

Tags in the Custom template consist of a name and an optional filter specifying to which elements it can be attached. Note that you will assign the tag to a whole element and not to the individual measures contained in them. For example, you cannot give separate tags to a rectangle's width and height measurement. Instead, you assign the tag to the whole rectangle and then specify in the table layout that you want to access the rectangle's width, for example.

The tag filter defines to what kind of measures the tag can be assigned. For example, if you want to collect window sizes, you probably do not want that the 'window' tag can be attached to an angle. Again note that this filter does not define what value is finally written in the output table. For example, you can select a Rectangle filter so that the tag can only be attached to rectangles, but the output table columns can still contain the rectangle's width, height, area, or perimeter.

A special tag filter is the Text note value. Only tags with this value may be assigned to text boxes (even tags with the filter set to Any may not be used for text boxes).

Fig. 3: the list of tags we have defined.
Fig. 4: tag configuration.
Fig. 5: tag filter choices.

Table layouts

You define the table layout by creating a list of columns that you would like to include in the table (Fig. 6). Each column can either contain a measurement from a tagged element or some metadata about the image in this row (like the image name).

For each column, you can specify these parameters:

  • Column header. Text to be placed in the table header row for this column. If left empty, the header will the tag name.
  • Content. Either a tag that you defined previously, or image metadata content. If you choose a tag, the measurement value from this element is written into the table cell. The possible metadata values are described below.
  • Measure. A tagged element may include several measurements. E.g. a circle has a radius, an area, a perimeter, and a diameter. Here, you select which of these values should be written into this column. You can use this, for example, to write the width and the height of a rectangle into two table columns. Both columns match the same element tag, but you use different values for the Measure parameter.
  • Multiple values. When you have several elements with the same tag in one image, the question is what to write into the table cell. You can choose between 'Keep', which simply writes all values into the cell, or other operations like 'Sum' or the 'Average' of these values.
  • Footer row. At the bottom of the table, there may be a footer row which contains some values calculated from all values in the column above. This may be the sum, average, minimum, maximum, or the median value of all measurements.

Image metadata content

Additionally to the measurements, a column may also contain metadata about the image (Fig. 8). This may be the:

  • Image name.
  • Image notes that have been entered in the Rename image dialog.
  • Image number as it is displayed in the image list (image numbering).
  • Image capture date as it is contained in the original image Exif data. If there is no Exif data, it will be the date the image was imported.
  • GPS coordinates from the image Exif data. This can either be placed in seperate columns as latitude/longitude values, or you can include a direct URL link to an online map provider. The map provider to be used can be selected in the ImageMeter settings in section Image export. You can choose between Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap. When you export as PDF, this table cell will contain a clickable link to the map at the position the image was captured.

Fig. 6: the table columns we have defined.
Fig. 7: table column configuration.
Fig. 8: metadata about image.

Area-sum template

The Area-sum template is a special template for calculating areas that consist of several partial areas. In this template type, there will be a whole section in the table for each image. Each row represents one tagged element. Hence, you can also assign the same tag to several elements (e.g. windows). Some tags may denote areas to be summed, whole other tags may denote areas to be subtracted.

Tags

Tags in the Area-sum template can only be assigned to elements that measure an area (rectangle, circle, general area polygon). As some element will represent areas that are added to the sum (e.g., walls) and some elements should be subtracted (e.g., windows), you can define for each tag, whether it should be subtracted (see Fig. 9).

Moreover, you can specify a multiplication factor for this area. An example application for this is when you are summing the room areas in floor plans. Some areas, for example the balcony, may only count with a factor of 0.5 in the total area sum, depending on your standards. You can also adjust this factor in the tag options.

Fig. 9: the tag configuration.

Table layouts

The table in area-sum templates is organized as one row for each element. This way, the table shows in detail from which terms the area sum is calculated in the image. In the table layout configuration you can define which columns to include in the output table.

Some of the columns you can add here will in fact generate two columns in the output table. These are the Width and height of the marked rectangle, and +/- area columns. The latter separates the areas that should be added and those that should be subtracted into individual columns.

The Measured area column will contain the raw measured value without the multiplicative factor or element count applied. The Calculated area, on the other hand, is the area after these two factors have been taken into account.

Fig. 10: area-sum table column options.