Improving viewing and organising maps in a project

Feature Requests
1

I have been finding it very difficult to locate maps & plans since changing over to the new “Projects” structure in DroneDeploy. From what I can work out so far, the following features are missing from the “Projects” concept. Perhaps I’m not using it right so any suggestions or fixes would be welcome.

  1. Maps are lost within the projects.
    Other users in my organisation have become completely lost in the new structure and they are ringing me to help them find their ‘lost’ maps and flight plans once they chose to merge maps into a project.

When you go into a project, it only shows the flight dates at the top, and you can’t easily see the Map name, only if you click the information button for each map. Is there an easy way to see a list of all the maps and flight plans within a project? If not, then both the Map Name and a list of all maps needs to be added to make navigating the project easier.

  1. The maps that have been merged into our projects are in different locations across a larger general area. When you click on the arrows near the dates to go to the next map in the project, it doesn’t zoom to the map extent. It would be good if this occurred.

  2. Once you’re in the ‘Settings’ pane for a Map or a project, there is no way to go back to the previous pane viewing the project details. The back button takes you right out to the home pane screen viewing folders, and the home button takes you back to the folder extent, viewing all the projects. I have to keep clicking back in to get where I was viewing before which is frustrating.

  3. I can’t find any way to remove maps from a project and have it exist on it’s own within a folder. Some maps have been accidentally added to a project and need to be changed, and for the time being these projects have made such a mess of our maps organisation that I just need to disband some projects back to the individual maps and start again. Is this possible?

Thanks

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2

@MIT. All very good questions as the Projects interface is very new and is now under adoption. As a technology manager I understand how frustrating it is for users to change.

Understanding the Project UI takes some getting use to for sure when most users are identifying with a Windows style folder interface. When your users are looking for a “map” are they use to searching through tens/hundreds of individual flights to find one “map”? Honestly, the search and sorting functions make it pretty easy to get through a layer of folders or project.

The way the UI is designed is to enable a standardized flight pattern to be flown time and again for consistency and when you setup a project you are given the opportunity to localize the extents. If you have several projects in the same area then you are best shrinking the project area and creating multiple sites.

3

Great, thanks for the tips. I’ll suggest that to the other users and it should improve their experience.

I also found in the Settings pane, the ability to turn off the new Drone Deploy beta interface. This removed the ‘Projects’ structure, and returned it to a folder based structure, so all those ‘missing’ maps were now visible to the user so they could order them in a better way.

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