How long until we have Thermals support?
I’d say it will depend on:
- How soon we get a pull request/contribution for it - or -
- How soon somebody finances its development - or -
- The alignment of the stars (kiddin’, depends on whenever an existing contributor decides to implement it freely on their own time)
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What kind of contribution would it take?
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or 
+ 
, or possibly a combination of the three.
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DroneDeploy can do it with Thermals.
Feature requests and feedback on areas that need work are both helpful. @AntDX316 please note that ODM is an open-source, volunteer-run effort. Everybody that works on this makes a choice to spend their some of their time on it, and they are not paid or compensated for it. Products like DroneDeploy have funded staff so things work differently there. Your requests are coming through as inappropriately pushy and demanding. I’m sure that’s not your intent, but just so you know… there are better ways to make suggestions in an open source community.
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In the interest of full disclosure, some of us are lucky enough to get paid to work on it, but that pay comes from folks with their own priorities. In other words, it’s usually pay with strings attached.
Piero does have some discretion to develop features for the general community. As I understand it, he gets this time through charging for the services that he provides in places like webodm.net. But, this time is usually not enough for major feature development, like adding thermal processing.
Free and open source (FOSS) projects are interesting from the inside and outside: from in outside, successful ones feel like they should be able to do anything, and it’s hard to know what a reasonable request is. From the inside of a project, they can feel very resource constrained: largely by time, money, and opportunity overload.
So, the trick is to listen: if someone within the project says: this is a big lift, we need or + 
:, or possibly a combination of the three, then there are two answers that work really well in response:
Ok. I didn’t know it was a big feature request! I hope someone comes along with the necessary resources. As a community member, I would be happy to be an early user and tester!
or
Let’s figure out if we can put together the resources to get this done! Here’s what I can contribute toward it: …
I am glad you are so excited to see thermal image processing added to the project. You are not alone. But alas, it is not an easy lift and needs support. That said, we are glad you are here and asking for new features!
Best,
Steve
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@smathermather great description, and I feel like your note here would make a great top-level category on https://docs.opendronemap.org/ e.g., “How To Ask For Help”.
Mind if I submit a PR to that effect?
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Ha! Perfect. After I wrote it, I was thinking the same. PR away.
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If you’ve not read it, the blog by Nyall Dawson touches on this quite nicely (focused on QGIS specifically, but applies well here as well).
http://nyalldawson.net/2016/08/how-to-effectively-get-things-changed-in-qgis/
Supplemental reading?
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Lol. s/QGIS/OpenDroneMap/g
That’s great supplemental reading.
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Pix4d takes advantage of the overlap of visual and thermal images for alignment. Drones such as the parrot anafi or the dji mavic 2 dual, take 2 photos each time, one thermal and one RGB. So it should be easier to align them.
You could open a crowdfunding for the implementation of thermal images!
It would be cool!
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