So I just started my land survey/inspection business, and have already produced some really useful data and results, all with my P3 and DroneDeploy.
Unfortunately I cannot see a way to share the orthomosaic and the underlying satellite map imagery easily. I read through DD docs and see thats by design.
I have been reading up on Google Earth and how that’s going out of business soon, and so was was wondering, how do you guys share your data with the client?
My ideal solution would be a way to share the orthomosaic sitting on top of Google Earth (or Bing Maps or whichever) and then be able to click on a spot and get some kind of reading, like the long/lat or the GPS coords.
Does anyone have any suggestions and could point me down the right path to research something like this?
Hi @Max_Galkin, If you select Share and ‘With another user’, you can put their email in there, and a personalized message. This will then send them a link which they can use to annotate/comment on the data and see the things you’re looking for (selecting points and seeing lat/lng among other things).
They don’t need to have a DD account to do this (it will redirect to the signup page), and they will be able to sign up as a free user.
Yeap I can see that if the other user creates a free dronedeploy account they can see the map and the underlying layer. But there is no way yo share that data without requiring the user to sign up correct? For example, here is some output from Maps Made Easy, and you do not need an account to see that.
So I am logged in as the user and am looking at the map. I can see the tools on the bottom right, but I do not see a way to get the GPS or lat/long data. I can see that i can make a marker and it will give me some coords where I click it. Is that the tool you are referring to, or am I missing something?
Yup - that’s the tool I was referring to. We found people wanted to copy and paste the lat/lng co-ordinates, so having something permanent was the better solution to allow for this.
Out of interest, what features would you be wanting in the public sharing? Is it just the base-layer imagery?
So the tool that gives the coordinates, which coordinates are those? What do they represent?
So I have clients that have walked the land earlier and have GPS coords of certain spots. They would like to be able to easily find the exact spot on the orthomosaic, so it would be great to be able to look up a point based on GPS data.
The co-ordinates are the ones for the pin you’ve just dropped. I see - so you’re wanting to input a co-ordinate, and have it create a marker (the reverse of the annotation)?
No not that. You see the example from Maps Made Easy right click anywhere and you get a popup that says long x and lat y. You do not need to drop a marker, so its easier to read. BUt thats ok I see that I get the data I want with the marker in DD.
Second question: is there a way to add my own layer to the map? I need the satelite, the orthomossaic, but also need to show the PDF map that the construction company gave me with all their markings. I am currently trying to figure this out in MapBox, but its another tool to learn
That’s a great feature request - I’ll add it to do requests workflow internally. I’m guessing that this wouldn’t be geo-referenced, so would you be able to pick a few points on the PDF and assign a lat/lng to it?
haha yeap, thats exactly where I am with this. I am trying to accomplish the same thing using MapBox, but that requires georeferencing the PDF. I am trying to figure out how to do that now. It would be great if you could drop in an image that is not georeferenced, but I can see the workflow issues with that (trying to scale and rotate the image to fit the map).
This would also be useful with things like different times and NDVI / RGB / thermal maps. I know you can achieve this with the time slider arm, but layers would be better. Even better would be a slider you could move left and right to hide / reveal different layers against one another.
Great suggestions - we had experimented with this on our old home-page.
The alternative to swiping between laters, is to have two panes, with exactly the same view on both, but with different layers, and as you move the one, you see it on both. This allows for many instant comparisons, without having to drag the bar across.
That’s kind of difficult. Both, tbh! Probably your second option of having both side by side - especially if we can zoom and pan each individually so could, if need be, line them up the same as with the swipe over option. The reason is that sometimes you want to get up close to some changes and need them right next to each other. Disaster relief is an obvious case in point, but things like bridge inspection, cliff inspection, etc where the slightest change might be indicative of a bigger underlying issue.
It’s a similar case to the numerous requests for links to the underlying source images, which could probably satisfy at least some of this, albeit not so quickly.
Thinking ahead to a means of automating this checking workflow (via API, perhaps), would / could it be possible to simultaneously access the two maps / layers for rapid, automated change identification using a CV algorithm? It would be useful to build that potential future capability into whatever path you go with. Unless that was an analysis you wanted to build yourselves? Something like a Change Heatmap layer would be good, but I’m going a bit OT, now! Stick it all together, though, and you have something truly awesome and pretty unique (with the exception of some military stuff, I believe).
HI, can you add a feature that clients can access DD and work on the outputs themselves, do their own volumes analysis, distances a area calculations. but limit access to upload photos so they can’t not create orthophotos, they can only work on the outputs we share with them.
and give access to multiple clients to their own data only.
Thanks for your feedback @photodrone - new sharing options are upcoming by popular request. Please subscribe to our forum or blog for more updates on new features.
Just having a few problems with the sharing link. I am sending it to some colleagues to get their opinions of the maps/aerialsgiven I am quite new to this. None of them are receiving an email inviting them to view my work.
I understand they don’t need to download DD so just wondering where the problem may lie. It is also not appearing in their junk folder. Could their computer settings be at odds with the software…i.e. insufficient RAM, poor graphics card.
In addition, depending on what you are trying to share you can upload the 3D model to Sketchfab and share that way, no account registrations are required: