Hyperlinking Photos in ArcPad and ArcGIS

Here are some quick and simple steps to allow you to view photos linked to features.

For this example, we will assume that we have a point feature class called "Trees", with a field called "Photo" which contains the file name of the photo linked to that feature. All of our photos are stored in c:\Photos.

ArcPad

1. Open ArcPad, and add the trees layer to your map
2. Open the Table of Contents
3. Open the Layer Properties for that layer
4. Go to the Hyperlink page
5. Set the Hyperlink field to Photo
   
6. Set the default hyperlink path to the folder that contains the photos
7. Click OK twice to close the dialogs
8. Use the Hyperlink tool from the Browse toolbar to select the tree on the map. If a photo is found, it will be opened for viewing.
   

ArcGIS: HTML Popups

1. Open ArcMap, and add your Trees feature class
2. Open the layer properties
3. Switch to the HTML Popup page
4. Check the "Show content for this layer using the HTML Popup tool" option
5. Select "As a URL"
6. In the prefix box, enter "C:\Photos" - the folder containing the photos.
7. Select Photo as the hyperlink field
8. Leave the suffix blank (supposing the file names already have the .jpg extension)
9. Click OK.
10. Use the HTML Popup tool
    to select features from the map. A small window will "pop up" from the point showing the photo for that feature.

ArcGIS: Hyperlinking

1. Open ArcMap, and add your Trees feature class
2. Open the layer properties
3. Switch to the Display page
4. Check "Support Hyperlink using field:"
5. Specify the hyperlink field to "Photo"
6. Click OK
7. Use the hyperlink tool to select features from the map.
   

Note: With hypperlinking, you will need either an absolute or relative path in the Photo field for this tool to work. An easy way to add these prefixes to the attribute is using these ArcMap field calculations.