Generating Reports

This article includes:

Reports overview

Lens makes it easy to compile polished monitoring reports for record-keeping or stakeholder engagement. These on-demand reports allow you to capture all your notes (see Making Notes) in one place with associated imagery or data. Reports can be printed, saved as a PDF on your device, or saved in Lens. There is no limit to the number of reports you can generate with Lens, and you're welcome to distribute reports to entities such as the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, landowners, legal counsel, contractors, and government or non-profit collaborators.

Creating a report

There are two ways to create a report: first is in the Reports pane, on the left side of the property map. Once created, reports can be edited to add a summary, update text, or modify images. 

When you click the create report button, your report will open in a separate browser window. You may get a note from your browser that Lens is trying to open another window. If you are having trouble, follow the instructions below to configure your web browser to allow pop-up windows for your selected websites: Apple Safari; Google Chrome; Mozilla Firefox; Microsoft Edge (note: toggle "Block" to "off"). Holding “command” while clicking the button will open the report in a new tab instead.

From here, you'll be able to adjust the date range (for example, you may want to include all notes from all time, or only from the prior year). And if you're using Note tags, you can filter down from here.

You can also create a report directly from the Notes pane by clicking this report icon at the top. This will reflect any filter and sorting selections you've made in the Notes pane up to that point.

If you working in a multi-location property, you have the option to create a report for “Only this Location” or for “All Locations for this Property.”

Modifying a report

There are a variety of ways you can modify your Lens reports to suit your needs, including the header on all pages, a summary at the beginning, and property overview images.

By default, the Property Overview page will display the most recent truecolor, high-resolution layer, if one is available. You can edit this image by selecting any other high-resolution option from the dropdown menu on the Property Overview page. 

Each note in Lens will correspond to a section in the report, and will include metadata about the data such as the source, capture time, coordinates, and more. From here, you can hover over the image to adjust the zoom levels, or reset to the default zoom. Finalize your changes by clicking the checkmark icon. 

Map scales will appear on the property overview map by default. It may be hidden by hovering over the map and clicking the ruler icon button. The scale is hidden by default on observation maps but may be shown if desired. Scales will default to the imperial measurement system, but will use metric if your organization is using hectares as its area unit.

Similarly, you can control when the locations of note geometries in a property are shown on the overview page of a report. The note geometries are toggled off by default, and can be shown by hovering over the property image, and clicking the location pin icon.

You can use the icons on the left to reorder the notes using the up and down arrows, or exclude a note using the hide icon. Exclude Analyze Area charts from an observation by clicking on the chart icon on the left-hand side of the page. By default, these charts will be included.

Admin users on Plus and Enterprise accounts can upload their organization's logo to be included in reports. This logo appears on the title page and gives a custom touch to your organization's reports. 

To add a logo to your account, navigate to the Settings page from the top right corner dropdown. On the Organization tab, Admin users will see a place to upload your logo. We support PNG, JPG, and JPEG file types for logos. If no logo is added, the Upstream Tech logo will appear by default. 

As soon as your organization’s logo is added, it will appear on all the bottom left of the first page in reports, as shown in the example below:

Saving and updating Lens reports

To save a report in Lens, you can click this floppy disk icon in the top right when you're in the report viewer. This will capture any updates you've made to text fields or images in the report, so that you can pick up where you left off later, or have this resource for other teammates to refer to in the future.

You can see any reports that have been saved in the Reports pane, as shown here, where you can click to reopen and continue editing the report. These reports are effectively re-created using any notes that were included at the time of creation. This means that if you need to edit the text of a note, for example, you can do that directly in the notes pane, and the next time you reopen that report, it will reflect the latest version of the note.

If you click into any of the saved reports, you'll see the option to edit the name of the report, and see a log including the original author, time of creation, and last update. This is helpful if you are collaborating on a report with a colleague. Note that users with read-only will be able to view reports, but not make any modifications. 

And if you prefer not to save your report in Lens, you can always save it to your device directly or print. To finalize and print, click the "Print" button. From there, you can "Save as PDF" or print a hard copy. If the "Print" button is disabled, it may be because you are still in editing mode for one or more of your Observations. And in some instances, your browser may automatically apply a header and footer to your report. You can disable this by doing the following:

  • Apple Safari: Click "Show Details," if visible. Uncheck the "Print headers and footers" option.
  • Google Chrome: Click the "More settings" section. Uncheck the "Headers and footers" option.
  • Mozilla Firefox: Click "Show Details," if visible. Change all "Page Headers" and "Page Footers" dropdown menus to the "--blank--" option.
  • Microsoft Edge: Change "Headers and footers" dropdown menu to the "Off" option.