So far I have lost about 12 hours of my life watching and waiting in excitement, to see a couple of larger mapping projects I was using to see if this product would be worth the price tag. So far it has the potential, yet not capable!!! I would recommend anyone looking into Drone Deploy wait for a while. I have 1 small 8 acre project completed that I did just to see how it worked. Put it to work on 50 acres, and tried uploading is 6 times once waiting 6hrs. to finish uploading before it croaked my pc. This left me starting over from scratch because It doesn’t offer a resume button to pickup where It left off. Tried the Turbo Load to make quick work, it failed twice after about an hour. Finally got it to upload all 420 pics and it only stitched portions of the grid, missing about 200 images. Been more of a pain than a benefit. Opportunity is there, hopefully they can get it straightened out, but wouldn’t pay anywhere close to their price with these issues.
Hpdb, I can understand your frustration. I have been a DD user for the last three years and have run into problems from time to time but was able to get them solved with help from DD support. Maybe I have run into your problem before so if you would like for me to offer some suggestions, I would be glad to try and help.
What are you mapping on this 50 acre plot; flat grassland, agriculture, construction project, land with lots of water? What is the altitude and overlap settings for this 50 acre project? What engine are you using to upload jpegs; Chrome, Firefox, Safari?
If you would rather speak to me in person, please feel free to do so. I will try my best to help.
I’ve uploaded 784 images from a scan and it’s been fine. Is it your internet connection or your PC which is to blame?
In all fairness I passed them all through JPEGmini Pro (http://www.jpegmini.com/) before uploading them because there’s no need to upload huge individual files which have next to no compression. I’d really suggest anyone takes a look at that software, it’s saved me tens of gigabytes hard drive space (not to mention upload speed for my online backups).
The upload time for these 784 images didn’t take that long, I’ve got about 1Mb upload speed max.
Hi Kelly,
I’m so sorry to hear this. Can I ask which browser you’re using and might it be an Internet connectivity issue? If that’s not the case, I would contact support@dronedeploy.com so they can look into it. Hope this helps.
@Hpdb301
As others have stated issues do pop up time to time; however, I have found that if you give the DD folks an opportunity that they will help you through your issues.
I typically only map projects that are hundreds of acres. They usually consists of 2,000 to 3,000 images at a time. I have fiber internet (500 mbps) and it usually takes only a couple minutes to upload all of the images, however I could see how on the regular broadband that would take a long time. I am using GCPs which I have found increases the processing time; however, the results have been field verified to be awesome. I had a recent roadway project that we checked at a couple of random points that were field surveyed and we had a XY difference of 0.001 cm and Z difference of 0.01 cm, so basically dead on!
Remember we are on the cutting edge and the people and technology are getting better everyday. Feel free to reach out to me as well if I can help.
Good Luck!
@dragonflyAS-- I’m hoping you meant to write 0.001**m** (not centimeters…that would best a First Order Survey!) But still- WOW, that really is spot on!
So DD support has been in touch, they are very helpful and offered several different possible reasons as to whatvwas going on. I am going to attempt to reshoot the prior mission from a different alt. And see if that aids in completing a map.
@northarrow
Nope meant cm 
I had the same reaction and I think that it was a bit of luck, but the points played out in that same range on at least 5 random field verified spots.
How would you even measure that? .001cm is 1/10th the width of a human hair.
@erkq
The measurements came from the engineer (client) who took whatever his surveyor provided and what was generated from the DD point cloud. Obviously a lot of luck and probably some rounding or decimals involved. My GCPs are supposed to get me within 2 cm global, 1 cm local so the results would indicate that we outperformed that. My real point though, was to point out the accuracy of the DD service as it relates to a field verified project.
I have had very good results every time so far.
If the upload is “croaking your PC” I would worry about network connectivity problems. I do lots of surveys, and the upload process is usually the easiest part (I have a 200 mbs cable service). I do wish DD would add a progress indicator to show how far along the process is, rather than just “queued” or “processing.”
@DDTom
The upload is for sure aided by my 500 mbs service as well. I would imaging that if you did the slowest upload options that you would start to get impatient; however, I do not see this as a DD issue as much as it is a high speed internet issue throughout many areas.
I also like the progress indicator idea.
Dragon,
Can you share your setup for these results? PM or Skype maybe so we don’t hijack this thread but I’d love to hear about this because I’m developing the drone processes for my firm and we have a ton of potential civil work for local government that would need this sort of accuracy. Our biggest hangup has been achieving the results you’re mentioning here.