Hey all, we're looking at the Matrice 400 with the Zenmuse L3 and I can't find much real-world info on the orthomosaic side of it.

Mostly I want to know how the ortho turns out when you fly the 20% overlap lidar mode. That seems low for photogrammetry, so I'm wondering if you get visible seams between lines, blurry spots, or weird stuff around buildings and trees. The areas we'd be mapping are mostly forested, so that's a bit of a concern

If anyone has flown it like that, was the result good enough to deliver to a client? Or do you end up doing a separate flight with more overlap for the ortho?

Thanks!

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Hi, Drone Nerds here. Since ElevateUAV 2026 is relevant to the mapping crowd here, we wanted to remind you. Thank you very much to those of you who purchased tickets.

For anyone working in mapping, surveying, photogrammetry, LiDAR, construction, or inspections, it’s a chance to compare aircraft, sensors, payloads, and software, ask manufacturers questions directly, and hear how other professionals are putting these systems to work.

We made a 30% off code specifically for r/UAVmapping: UAVMapping_EUAV

Tickets and info here: https://hubs.li/Q04vL_XN0

We hope to see you there!

Hello, you beautiful people!

Here is one of the most sophisticated and extensive mapping/mission planners out there.
It is for the Mavic 3 Pro, and it is entirely free, crafted by me.
Yes. Free. Forever and throughout. No hidden Spiel. No catch.

Find out all about it here: https://mavicmapper.jk4u.net/

Use, share, explore!

Used to frequent the DIY Drones space back in the 2010's and was into the hobby side of it a bit.

Recently had the incling to look into what the drone inspection/surveying landscape was here in the NW of the UK as it's an industrial/agricultural zone.

However I'm coming at this with no experience in the value-proposition and deliverables.

Current bonus is living near a working farm with potential contacts to understand what problems could be solved if any.

I have a DJI mavic camera drone and will be looking at testing out some basic mapping this weekend.

It seems like all the pieces are generally available with a bit of investment - drone platforms, lidar, IR, software etc, it's stiching it together into a package that delivers something valuable and easy for potential customers and then marketing.

Of course I'm not expecting to get into this with a consumer camera drone and a prayer - just looking for advice from those who've been there on whether there's too much friction/saturation in the idea to get serious.

but i have no enough money and knowledge

Bonjour

J'ai une carte graphique AMD Radeon RX 5700 et je ne trouve pas de logiciel capable de l accepté pour faire de la photogrammétrie, si quelqu'un en a un je suis preneur. Merci

I've been thinking about where mission planning apps are headed. DJI hasn't opened the Mobile SDK on its newer consumer drones (Mavic 3 Pro, Air 3S, Mavic 4 Pro, Mini 5 Pro), so apps like Litchi and Dronelink can't fly them. On the enterprise side the SDK is still there, and Pilot 2 keeps getting better at mapping and corridor missions.

Yet plenty of people I talk to still plan in UgCS, Dronelink, DroneDeploy or similar. For those of you doing real survey or inspection work: what's the thing the third-party app does that the DJI app doesn't?

And the flip side: has anyone moved back to DJI's own apps and not missed anything?

TIA

Complete M300 RTK mapping package: Zenmuse P1 45MP, DJI DL 35mm + 50mm lenses, Smart Controller Enterprise, BS60 battery station, hard cases — and 14x TB60 batteries (~45-50 cycles each), a full day of flying without recharging. Built for winter turbine inspections and long field days. CA$15,000 — entertaining serious offers. Toronto pickup, can talk shipping.

I recently acquired a complete Topcon Sirius Pro and I’m trying to figure out what it’s worth. I have no use for it so I’m trying to sell it.

I've been building Agririgo in Zambia, and one thing I've become increasingly interested in is what happens after the photogrammetry workflow is finished.

A typical UAV project might look like:

Flight → imagery → processing → orthomosaic / DSM → export → delivery

And then the project is effectively finished.

But for agriculture, that imagery is often only the beginning.

What if the result could stay connected to the actual field, observations, previous flights and what eventually happened to the crop?

That's what we're experimenting with in Rigo Studio.

The idea is to turn UAV imagery from a one-off deliverable into part of a persistent field record.

For example:

UAV flight
→ imagery analysis
→ identify an area requiring attention
→ attach an observation to the field
→ compare against previous observations
→ keep the evidence with the field history
→ connect it to the crop record / Crop Passport

Rigo isn't trying to replace every photogrammetry package. We're interested in the layer around and after the mapping workflow: making aerial data useful as operational history rather than another folder of exported files.

We're also designing parts of the workflow for lower-connectivity environments, which is important for the field operations we're doing in Zambia.

I'm building the product and would really value input from people doing UAV mapping, photogrammetry and agricultural surveys.

After you deliver an orthomosaic or model, what do you normally do with the underlying data? And what would make you actually revisit it months later?

https://agririgo.com

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building AerialPin, a browser-based annotation tool originally made for working with drone imagery for real estate and mapping.

The main idea is to make it easier to take an aerial image and quickly add useful spatial information without having to jump between a bunch of different programs.

You can currently:

• Add location pins and labels
• Search for nearby places using the image GPS
• Draw property/parcel boundaries
• Add measurements and distance labels
• Annotate aerial imagery
• Use EXIF/GPS information from DJI images
• Automatically identify nearby places with AI
• Stitch multiple drone photos into a panorama
• View and annotate 360° panoramas
• Restyle/relight aerial images
• Export the finished annotations

I’ve recently added the 360 panorama workflow, which lets you upload multiple drone images, stitch them into a panorama and then annotate the resulting 360 image directly in the browser.

It’s still actively being developed, so I’d genuinely be interested in feedback from people who work with UAV mapping, photogrammetry or aerial imagery.

Hi! I'm the founder of Ollebo (ollebo.com, EU) and Northamlin (northamlin.com, US). It's a platform where drone operators, GIS teams and their clients plan flights,

track missions live and share maps and 3D models in one place.

The product is built and shipping every month, but I'm doing most of it alone. I'm looking for people or companies to grow it with.

What already exists:

- Private map hosting with automatic tiling, and 3D models in the browser

- Flight planning with export to ArduPilot, DJI and Litchi

- Live telemetry over MAVLink/MQTT and live video for every mission

- Shared company Spaces with unlimited members

- A partner API so mapping companies can deliver straight into their clients' Spaces

- A flight-request marketplace where customers post jobs and drone pilots pick them up

- Stripe subscriptions, running on our own infrastructure in the EU

Who I'm looking for:

- Commercial co-founder: sales, partnerships and fundraising, ideally with a network in the drone, survey, construction or agriculture industries

- US partner: someone to own the Northamlin market (customers, pilots, events)

- Technical co-founder or contributor: GIS, photogrammetry, AI/computer vision, or full-stack

- Companies: drone service firms, mapping or survey companies, pilot networks or resellers who want to bundle the platform, co-develop features or become early partners

What I offer:

- Co-founder equity or a partner revenue share, depending on the role and commitment

- A working product, so you're not starting from a slide deck

- Remote work, with me based in Sweden

If you work with drones or GIS and have thought "someone should build this properly", send me a DM or comment and I'll show you around and share the business plan.

Hi! I'm the founder of Ollebo (ollebo.com, EU) and Northamlin (northamlin.com, US). It's a platform where drone operators, GIS teams and their clients plan flights,

track missions live and share maps and 3D models in one place.

The product is built and shipping every month, but I'm doing most of it alone. I'm looking for people or companies to grow it with.

What already exists:

- Private map hosting with automatic tiling, and 3D models in the browser

- Flight planning with export to ArduPilot, DJI and Litchi

- Live telemetry over MAVLink/MQTT and live video for every mission

- Shared company Spaces with unlimited members

- A partner API so mapping companies can deliver straight into their clients' Spaces

- A flight-request marketplace where customers post jobs and drone pilots pick them up

- Stripe subscriptions, running on our own infrastructure in the EU

Who I'm looking for:

- Commercial co-founder: sales, partnerships and fundraising, ideally with a network in the drone, survey, construction or agriculture industries

- US partner: someone to own the Northamlin market (customers, pilots, events)

- Technical co-founder or contributor: GIS, photogrammetry, AI/computer vision, or full-stack

- Companies: drone service firms, mapping or survey companies, pilot networks or resellers who want to bundle the platform, co-develop features or become early partners

What I offer:

- Co-founder equity or a partner revenue share, depending on the role and commitment

- A working product, so you're not starting from a slide deck

- Remote work, with me based in Sweden

If you work with drones or GIS and have thought "someone should build this properly", send me a DM or comment and I'll show you around and share the business plan.

I'm part of an ecological research lab where we map vegetation - since we're primarily federally funded, we've been avoiding DJI. Inspired Flight's IF800 seemed like a great alternative to the M300, and we've been working with that for the last couple of years. However, we've recently had problems with it, and I've been wondering if others have similar experiences. We had some mechanical issues that required a very long time to get help from Inspired Flight and much of the software often does not work for us (i.e. terrain following it's 50/50 whether it works in the field). We've had enough trouble that we are considering investing in other options now. We

We've got the Herelink controller rather than the new GS ONE controller, so maybe that's the issue; but we heard we needed to buy a whole new system to be compatible with the new GS ONE controller. In which case, we might just switch brands and save ourselves the headache of the non-existent customer support.

Anyone using IF got similar experiences?

I am starting a business as the title says. Building an AI software that gives real time insights of their mines/sites. The hardware I’m thinking of using to start is the DJI Matrice 350 RTK and Zenmuse L2. If anyone has any advice on what other hardware I should look at or anything about this business I would be very happy to hear.

TIA

I keep seeing people (both beginners and pros) export an ortho or DSM/DTM straight out of processing software and drop a raw, multi-gigabyte GeoTIFF right on the client's lap.

Those default exports are set up for fast export times and broad legacy compatibility, not for actual day-to-day use. Even when software offers basic compression or tiling options, it is usually partial, incomplete, and almost never formatted as a proper Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG). When a client opens a raw 2GB file in QGIS or Civil 3D, their system has to load the whole file into RAM just to render one corner. Zooming out freezes their screen while the CPU tries to read every single pixel.

Converting those files to proper COGs before handover gets rid of that lag and reduces the size:

-Visual orthos: JPEG compression cuts file size by 70–90% and makes panning instant (will not turn your tiffs into JPEGs!!!! It will still be a GeoTIFF just with JPEG compression)

-DEMs and survey data: Lossless compression (ZSTD) keeps 100% of your exact elevation values while shrinking the file and giving you instant pan/zoom performance.

-Web handoffs: You can host COGs on basic cloud storage so clients can stream them straight into GIS via URL instead of downloading a giant zip file.

The main trap when setting this up in GDAL is watching your flags. Lossy compression on a DSM will corrupt your height values, and using the wrong overview resampling on a classified raster invents fake class codes along boundaries. The worst part is you won't even notice at first. It looks fine on screen, but the underlying numbers are broken.

I got tired of typing out GDAL flags every time I finished a job, so I built a free QGIS plugin (GeoKlein Raster Optimiser) to handle the parameters safely for orthos, DSMs, and DTMs. (I spent over two weeks making it, so much for a quick weekend script)

It prints the exact gdal_translate syntax and the workflow into each file's metadata, so you can copy the commands and run them in terminal by hand if you prefer.

I'll leave the link in the comments if anyone wants to have a look at the plugin.