Software That Outputs Plan View of Pictures Taken

[max72]

If you are outside (and you camera/phone have a decent location solution) you can use the exif data in some tools.
For instance in Globalmapper you can drag and drop the images and the icons are placed in the position you get from exif data (you can choose the reference system).
Double clicking the icon opens the image in the viewer.
The image is from a drone mapping session, but you get the idea.
Massimo

[JFlammVDC]

What about Matterport? Might be a little much.

Matterport isn't georeferenced at all so rather useless for his workflow

I missed that part. My bad!

[pipingdesigner]

They have other solutions also

This looks interesting, I'm waiting to hear more from the North American distributor:

https://www.redcatch.at/smartphonertk/

I already use a Faro S70; this would be just for project early stages during scope definition.

One requirement is that it works indoors.

[Justin Richards]

Would something like Holobuilder.com or Openspace.ai work for you? You would probably need a 360 camera to get the most out of it but either way, that seems to be the industry standard now and both would allow for 2D pictures.

[cesaralmeida]

so this software needs to understand positions (relative or absolute?) of images, both indoors and outdoors, along with their orientation, and generate a plan of sorts from it.

Budget wise, under 399 euros... which is the cost of that smartphone RTK.

here's a thought:
Is going back to the people that are taking these images, and encourage them to make annotations or descriptions along with them an option? surely there must be a phone app to alleviate that task?

or maybe do a video instead and describe the site? Youtuber style? A bit of training might go a long way.

[RobM]

What would be a real time saver is software that can locate direction and location of (camera, not scanner) photos taken in the field. This would be used (say, by clients or a field engineer) to initially locate points of interest and planning for later laser scanning.

After web searches I haven't been able to find such a thing and apparently GPS is not precise enough for locations to be extracted from EXIF data.

Any ideas how this could be accomplished?

Paul

I know that there's a bunch of software on the German market that does exactly what you are looking for. From what I understand you are looking at getting an arrow on a (plan/map/ some sort of background) that shows where the picture was taken and what direction it was taken.. and by clicking the arrow you get to the picture, did i get that right? (i don't think you need structure from motion or 3d reconstruction of any sort for this)
if so, at least here in Germany, for court cases there are sworn experts that use this kind of software for documentation purposes and its part of many "gutachtersoftware" . like this one: https://projectdocu.com/
I don't know if that's of any help but maybe try searching Canadian or American software for that branch. hope that helps

[pipingdesigner]

https://projectdocu.com/

Looks quite interesting but it says "GPS-based" so the precision may not be high enough and also I need it to work indoors.

[gsisman]

What would be a real time saver is software that can locate direction and location of (camera, not scanner) photos taken in the field. This would be used (say, by clients or a field engineer) to initially locate points of interest and planning for later laser scanning.

After web searches I haven't been able to find such a thing and apparently GPS is not precise enough for locations to be extracted from EXIF data.

Any ideas how this could be accomplished?

Paul

You can use the location data (if you have it turned on on your device (Ipad phone) for photo. There is a GIS Geoprocessing routine in ESRI software ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro for taking a folder of photos and turning them into GIS point features with field filled with the Geo coords (Lat & Long) and another field with the orientation -Ipad or phone IMU. These will point to the location of the Photo folder or if you choose -the location within the Geodatabase. These can then be loaded into a Feature service and when loaded into a GIS map or loaded into Civil 3D through a free Plugin from Esri called ArcGIS 4 Autocad. You can click on the point and it will open the phot at the location using whatever viewer you have on your computer for that format of photo.
We use chevrons for the point symbology and you can assign the chevron direction to read the IMU fiel (probably Magnetic north azimuth) to point the direction of the photo was taken
https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-for-au ... utocad.htm

[landmeterbeuckx]

If you are outside (and you camera/phone have a decent location solution) you can use the exif data in some tools.
For instance in Globalmapper you can drag and drop the images and the icons are placed in the position you get from exif data (you can choose the reference system).
Double clicking the icon opens the image in the viewer.
The image is from a drone mapping session, but you get the idea.
Massimo

Massimo,

Which version of GM is that? I still run v18.1 but my icons are wayyyy of.

[max72]

If you are outside (and you camera/phone have a decent location solution) you can use the exif data in some tools.
For instance in Globalmapper you can drag and drop the images and the icons are placed in the position you get from exif data (you can choose the reference system).
Double clicking the icon opens the image in the viewer.
The image is from a drone mapping session, but you get the idea.
Massimo

Massimo,

Which version of GM is that? I still run v18.1 but my icons are wayyyy of.

The picture was taken with 24,1. I have yet to install 25.

When I used them they worked fine for me. Picture taken with the phone with no GPS signal are usually thrown away.. but besides that the others are good.
Massimo