Just recently, WebODM has had some great updates that make this a killer platform for commercial work.
Here are a few other features that I think could also be a great help:
- When creating a shareable link, there should be away to define what menu items are available from the fly out menu on the left when viewing the PC or textured model.
For example, for each accordion section from the menu, there could be a visibility checkbox for that section. For many end users of a map/model, they would have no use for the Clipping, scene, appearance and filters section. These users would not
know what the contents of these sections mean. A great many decision makers are really just interested in viewing the model/map. And in that context, it would be super powerful to also be able to check off what submenu items in each section are visible. i.e within the navigation, just display the boxes for showing each view (Side, top ..), but not all of the navigation options.
Similarly, for the Measuerment section, it would be nice to be able to pick what measurement tools are necessary. For some users, they might not need any, but for a facilities or building manager they might want to see all of them. A specific example of this is I’m making models/maps of municipal buildings in town that the town will post on their website. We really don’t want the general public messing with the model and maps. They could fill it with measurements, annotations etc… We’ll just want them to view them. I know there is an “Editable” checkbox when sharing, but I have not seen this do anything. 
Now, maybe instead of selecting these items when sharing, it might be preferrable to create user profiles ahead of time at the project level for different user types and then just select that profile from a dropdown when sharing. i.e (Public, Engineers, Managers)
- I also just noticed that on the ortho view, there is a new AI button that is able to detect and use a bounding box to ID cars, boats etc.
For doing commercial work, I had trained a PyTorch model using this dataset (GitHub - Praveenkottari/BD3-Dataset: This repository provides the BD3 dataset, containing over 3,965 annotated RGB images. It supports evaluating computer vision techniques for automatic defect identification to improve building inspections. A comprehensive study and comparison results simulate the identification and classification of defects in various real-world built environments.) of building defects to automatically find cracks, peeling paint, spalling and stains. This trained model combined with ortho’s of parking lots and building facade could be an awesome commercial feature to have. I’m more than happy to share this trained model.
Now with these additional features it would be way ahead in many ways with the competition. For example, in DJI’s Terra, there is no sharing ability. you have to get DJI Modify to do that. But if you do share it, there are no tools for the end user like what WebODM has. And together those 2 products cost over $2k a year!
The DJI product, FlightHub2 can now create models and maps, but can’t share them either! It’s mainly for mission planning. All of the other big players also have mission planning software. But they just use the DJI API which FlightApp uses. I’m fine with using the controller for creating missions instead of having a 3rd party app do it.
And other platforms like HammerMissions or DroneDeply are INSANELY expensive. And yes, this cost can be billed to a customer, but depending on where you live, many drone pilots are not flying year round and can have month to month billing for these platforms.
WebODM is very affordable and with these few additional features, it could be a far better platform than the rest of the solutions out there! The pain I have seen, is that the other platforms are NOT comprehensive. They offer a few key features but not the core ones at a good price.
Thanks for reading this long post! And keep up the great work!