Today I’ve released GitHub - uav4geo/GCPEditorPro: Amazingly fast and simple ground control points interface. ◎, an improved interface for tagging GCP images.
This is also a bit of an open-source sustainability experiment, reason why the software is released under the “Fair Source License” and is under the UAV4GEO organization. The Fair Source License is not really, really open-source, at least by OSI’s standards. We’ll see how it goes and consider changing it to a more permissive license in the near future.
Feedback welcome!
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I am looking forward to using this myself… .
Now Fair Source is OSI approved, correct? It’s not a license I am very familiar with.
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I don’t think it’s OSI approved, as it restricts certain freedoms (the use limitation clause being a big one), however, I think it strikes a good balance between openess and allowing for fair monetization. https://fair.io/ explains it best. I don’t think it works well for a lot of projects, but it made sense to try for this one.
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I think it does work, as you’ve indicated. We have a proven GCP Editor already, and if users so choose, they can get a more robust one as needed as a paid add-on. Perhaps in due time, some improvements from the paid one could make it upstream to the unpaid, correct?
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Hi Piero,
Many thanks for producing this. Wanted to support the cause so took a licence and threw a small 120 image 20mp dataset at it. The resulting model through WebODM was excellent.
Some thoughts to improve this tool;
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image load times weren’t great. Perhaps you could sequentially load the images? Currently all images load in parallel. Resulted in at least a 30-40 second wait until I could start going through them. This was on a gaming laptop with the images on a Samsung NVMe drive.
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The warning to use ctrl-mouse scroll should probably disappear when the user has started zooming in.
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Reloading the image set for each image was tedious, and just meant more image loading again and again. It might be a better workflow; select GCP file -> select images / directories -> Then see the gcp overview screen <-> select which GCP to tag.
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Linked to the above could there be a filter by image distance from the GCP point? That would help narrow down the images.
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Would it be worth a save function at the GCP tag screen, so you could save an incomplete GCP file?
For small image sets the current workflow is fine. My latest survey was 1500 images… which would have been a challenge to find all the relevant images!
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One wish list item is definitely a pre-filtering where the images available are limited to the ones that are near enough to the GCPs. I have done this before before adding the images to a GCP interface by extracting the image centroids and then only extracting nearby images. It’d be cool if the interface did this.
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This is excellent feedback. I’ve opened an issue to track this: https://github.com/uav4geo/GCPEditorPro/issues/5
Thanks for purchasing a license and supporting the software! Will definitely look into adding some/all of these ideas in the near future.
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Hi Piero,
I’ve some licenses now. I tested the interfase with some mid size projects and results are just nice. A filter by image distance will be a big improvement, that’s for sure.
Thank you.
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Musing a bit here, but what would it cost for there to be a “permanent” license of the GCP Editor pro for WebODM Lightning accounts?
I don’t currently work consistently enough to be pumping credits into my account, but would love for the possibility of the GCP Editor Pro to remain on my account regardless of how many credits I’ve purchased in the past year.
You could simply buy a standalone license from https://uav4geo.com/software/gcpeditorpro. They don’t expire.
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Would that work with my WebODM Lightning account credentials, and/or be active if I add that instance to a local LiveODM?
It wouldn’t be tied to lightning, you could just install the native Linux app on your LiveODM instance (or install the WebODM plugin also on LiveODM).
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For the licensing of GCP Editor Pro, is it a license to the person, the machine, or something else?
For instance, there are three machines I’d likely make use of GCP Editor Pro Starter on at any given time. However, there’s no way I would be using all three machines at once, and nobody else would be using them other than myself.
Is this in compliance with the licensing for Starter, or do I need Pro?
License is per user. So you just need Starter 
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Is there a plugin to integrate with the new windows native version? I just got a starter license, can’t seem to find a plugin, but did manage to use the tool externally. Looks good. It’s very easy to use if yuo’ve done this sort of thing before, but where I find it less clear is when you integrate with WebODM.
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There’s currently a bug disallowing the loading of external plugins in the native version. GCPEditorPro-WebODM-Plugin on Native Windows WebODM · Issue #991 · OpenDroneMap/WebODM · GitHub
We’re going to fix it soon.
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I purchased GCP Editor Pro along with WebODM today. I installed and am using the WebODM on a practice project from a drone mission I flew yesterday. Where do I find GCP Editor Pro and how do I learn how it works? Thank you
You can install it outside WebODM or use the plug-in.
Thanks, Andreas. I already installed it from the download I received after purchasing. But it does not appear in my Applications. Does that mean it installed itself as a plugin? Either way, I can’t find it. Any thoughts?
