Missing Poster

I noticed Search and Rescue personnel having a little trouble taking a missing person’s photo and making a “Missing Person” poster with the relevant details. In particular I saw that they didn’t have enough time to do this with a Microsoft Word template; most of them just “hack” the image together using MS Paint. This leads to the issue where, if new information is discovered, the manager has to create a new poster (since it’s not easy to edit an image file).

Over a period of three days I developed a small application that uses .net, Microsoft Reporting, and some other simple technologies to generate a “Missing Person” poster.

Download:

Missing Poster is now hosted on its own web site, you can go there for documentation, support and announcements. Source  code and bug reports are hosted on GitHub.

Download the installer

Missing Poster is provided for free to the Police and Search and Rescue community, and for anyone else who might find it useful.

Features:

  • Simple, easy to use
  • Prompts the user for relevant details
  • Easy to add image to poster
    • cut and paste
    • drag and drop
    • click “browse” for file
  • Allows the user to create a large, free text area for a description
  • User can enter height and weight as free text, including units
  • The poster is generated as a report,
    • reports can be customized for size,  layout, font and other properties
    • can add and remove fields as necessary
  • Saves the missing person information for archiving, retrieval and editing
    • Save format is human readable XML
    • Can be parsed by other software
    • Schema available
  • Generate the poster in the following formats:
    • Common Image file formats (JPG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF) for posting on social media
    • PDF – for emailing and printing
    • Word – for editing later
    • Excel
  • Print the poster
  • Image can be added to poster through cut/copy/paste directly from image editing software

Roadmap

  • HTML output for embed on web pages
  • Social media integration
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
  • Email integration
  • simple photo editing
    • rotate
    • crop
    • sharpen
  • image acquisition
    • scanner
    • camera
  • Transition to Open Source

Requirements

  • Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and above
  • probably 2 GHz and 2 gigs ram to be safe
  • .NET 4.0 Client Profile (download included)

Licence

This software and code are free, and are committed to the public domain in the hopes that it is useful for helping locate missing people.
Users can download, adapt, remix, port, and compile this software as much as they like, however you cannot sell it and all intellectual property rights reside with Blue Toque Software.
This code is released WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. My name, or the name of BlueToque Software cannot be used to market or promote this software in any way without prior authorization in writing
Contact me and I can provide assistance customizing forms to your particular needs, and other help using the software.