❓FAQs

Q: What is Pinpoint?

Pinpoint is a Digital Asset Management tool fully built and operated by the Digital Ops-Tech Centre (DOTC) in the Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS) for MINDEF/SAF.
Pinpoint was featured in the 2023 #techforpublicgood hackathon organised by Open Government Products (OGP) from GovTech, which saw developers from both DOTC and OGP working together to build the first Pinpoint prototype.

Q: What classification of data is Pinpoint rated for?

Pinpoint is hosted on Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC) and is built with security features and practices that makes it IM8 compliant for usage up to RESTRICTED / SENSITIVE NORMAL materials.
Unit commanders can exercise discretion to limit what materials their personnel upload to Pinpoint.

Q: Who can access and use Pinpoint?

Pinpoint is available to all MINDEF/SAF personnel and WOG officers with internet-enabled .gov.sg domain emails (e.g. Defence Mail, DWP).
MSD is supportive of usage of Pinpoint up to RESTRICTED Sensitive/Normal, as long as Pinpoint remains IM8 compliant and is hosted on GCC.
Users should read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy before logging in.

Note that currently, some features may not work as well on DWP and GSIB. We are working on it!

Q: Will Pinpoint be decommisioned?

Rest assured, Pinpoint is built in-house and is managed by DOTC, under MINDEF/SAF. Our product is here for the long run. We're fully committed to supporting and improving it, and there are no plans to drop it.

Q: Is there a storage limit for users?

No, Pinpoint offers unlimited storage for all our users!

Q: Is Pinpoint available 24/7?

Yes, Pinpoint is available 24/7, allowing users to access and utilise its features anytime on desktops, laptops and mobile devices as long as they have access to the internet.

Q: What can I use Pinpoint for?

Here are some existing use cases for Pinpoint.
- Media archival
- Public communications
- Crisis management/ Rapid media operations
- Internal training/ operations learning

Q: Who can see the media that I upload?

Images and videos uploaded in your "personal workspace" are accessible only to you. However, you have the option to share these files with other users by uploading them into a shared workspace. From there, you can also create shareable links to people outside of the workspace or outside Pinpoint.
Pinpoint currently employs AWS Rekognition to provide automatic AI tagging of faces in images. Unless specifically requested, user-uploaded media will not be sent to AWS for training. AWS will also not use any images submitted for training purposes for sharing or other training-related purposes.
The team is working on features that will allow our users to select which AI tagging works best for them, including the usage of our dataset.

Q: Can I use Pinpoint for my unit’s operations?

Pinpoint is cleared for use with up to RESTRICTED / SENSITIVE NORMAL materials. Unit commanders can decide to use Pinpoint for their unit’s operations if they deem it appropriate. If you are unsure if Pinpoint can be used for your unit’s operations, Contact Us!

Q: Is Pinpoint available on mobile?

Yes! Pinpoint is now available on your mobile devices. Click here to find out more.

Q: Who can I contact for more information?

You can contact the Pinpoint team through our Contact Us form, we will be happy to answer any questions you have!

Q: Do Pinpoint AI tags work on all media formats?

Pinpoint AI tagging currently works on .png, .jpg and .jpeg format media.

Q: What is the difference between desktop/laptop vs mobile Pinpoint?

The mobile and desktop/laptop versions of Pinpoint are nearly identical, however some functions are only available on desktops/laptops. Refer to the table below for specifics:

Feature

Desktop / Laptop

Mobile

Upload

✅

✅*

Tagging

✅

Edit media details

✅

Filter by Tag

✅

Filter by: Uploader, Country, Format, Date

✅

Share / Copy / Delete / Download media

✅

Access Workspaces

✅

Manage Workspace Access

✅

Manage Workspace Links

✅

Workspace Creation / Modification

✅

Workspace Logs

✅

❌

Q: Will my data be lost if a user leaves the organisation?

No, your data is safe. All media uploaded by that user will continue to be available.
Any shared workspace they created will still work as expected. Just keep in mind that if there are no remaining administrators in the workspace, admin-only features won’t be accessible.

In the event that no administrators remain, please Contact Us for help

Q: Can I remove myself from the workspace if I am an admin?

Yes! To do that, first ensure that there is more than 1 admin in the workspace. You can do this by adding or assigning another user to as admin.
Then remove yourself from the workspace via workspace access.

Q: Will there be new features added to Pinpoint?

Pinpoint is in active development and our team is working hard to deliver new features. If you have requests for features to be added, or if you have a specific use case that you think Pinpoint can serve better, do Contact Us so we can help!

Q: Why are there no thumbnails for my videos?

After uploading media, there will be a default thumbnail shown while the actual thumbnail is being generated. Please refresh the page to view the thumbnails once they are generated.
When a thumbnail cannot be generated, the default thumbnail will be shown.

Q: Will we be extending Pinpoint to public users?

There are currently no plans to extend Pinpoint to non-governmental agencies.

Q: Can I merge two workspaces?

Although we do not have an explicit feature to do so, we do have a feature to copy media from one workspace to another. See the guide for desktop or mobile for more information!
We advise copying media in batches (~500 files / 50GB at a time).

Q: I did not receive any OTP in my inbox

If you are logging in with a defencemail address (defence.gov.sg), ensure that you are using your longform email address. (e.g., "Jason_lim_zhi_hao@" instead of "Jlimzih@")
The OTP email may also be in your spam/junk folder or bin. If using Outlook, it may also be found in the Others tab (next to Focused).
There may be a chance that the email provider is facing issues; in this case we will put up notices informing users of this issue.
If none of these apply, feel free to Contact Us!

Q: What formats does/will Pinpoint support?

The full list of image and video formats can be seen in the Upload page.
Unfortunately, SVG support was removed due to security concerns and we do not plan to reintroduce support for it.
At present, we currently do not have plans to support audio formats (e.g. mp3, ogg, wav, aac, m4a). We recommend converting them into a video format like mp4 before uploading.
- Likewise, we currently do not have support for raw/arw files, and would recommend converting them into an image format like jpg before uploading.
- If you would like us to support new formats, feel free to Contact Us with your suggestion and share with us your use case!

Q: How can I create folders? / Why tags and not folders?

Pinpoint uses tags instead of folders for categorising media as it is a more flexible method of categorisation.
Most notably, while traditional folders are constrained by the file hierarchy, tags do not have such hierarchy and can be freely combined when assigning tags to media or searching for media. Furthermore, tags can be viewed as an extension of traditional folders; anything that can be done with folders can be done in tags.
- Example. Suppose I want to organise my event photographs by year and event name, and also further categorise photos in each event by famous people inside them. So I have a traditional folder hierarchy with the folder structure year/event name/person name . This is very convenient if I know the year of the event and the event name.
  - However, say I want to retrieve all photos of this person A across all years and events. I will have to look into every year and event name folder to see if person A is there. This is not scalable with large number of events. It may be possible to use your file explorer's smart search or the terminal, but this makes searching unnecessarily complex.
  - What if one photograph has two famous people inside? I will now have to make a copy of the photograph so that it exists in both year/event name/person A and year/event name/person B. A lot of disk space would be wasted on duplicated files.
  - Likewise, what if an event spans two years? Aside from duplicating the whole event folder, we could just categorise it under the earlier year. However, this would make it impossible to search for this event by the later year.
- With tags, I can assign separate tags representing year, event name and some person names to each photo. One advantage of tags over folders is that I can assign two years or multiple person names to a single photo, e.g. (2025, 2026, New Year Countdown, Singer A, Emcee B)
  - To find all photos at an event, I can filter by year and then event name similar to folders.
  - To find all photos of a famous person, I can just filter by the tag of their name.
  - To find photos that have two famous people, I can filter by both. Likewise, for event photos that span two years, I can filter by both their years.

Below is a table that shows the operations done with folders that can also be done with tags.

Operation