What we shipped,
and when.

The training project has always let you practise every tool on real finished data. But comparing flights needs two finished projects of the same site — so the feature you were least likely to have tried was the one a single sample could never show you.

Your account now carries two samples: one site, flown eight days apart. Tick both in your Projects list and press Compare for the swipe view and the cut/fill readout, on data where nothing you do costs anything or breaks anything.

One thing you will see there, and it is deliberate: the two were built different ways — one reconstructed from raw photos, one from an already-processed export — so Compare warns you that differencing them measures the pipelines as well as the ground. Better to meet that warning here than for the first time on your own site. Read the volume in the samples as a demonstration of the workflow, not as a survey result.

Until now every project was dated by the moment it finished uploading. For raw-photo projects DroneFlow now reads the real capture time out of the photos themselves, and dates the flight by that. Existing projects have been updated too.

This changes elapsed time between flights, and anything read from it. One site here was flown eight days apart and uploaded three days apart — so its progress was being reported over three days instead of eight, making the rate of work look more than twice what it was. Volumes were never affected: those are a difference between two surfaces and do not depend on the calendar. If you have quoted a rate from a period on a timeline or in a weekly email, it is worth a second look.

An already-processed export carries no flight date anywhere, so those still fall back to their upload date — and the compare page now tells you which projects those are instead of letting an upload date pass for a flight date. It also warns when you compare a raw-photo reconstruction against a processed export, because those surfaces are built differently and differencing them measures the pipelines as much as the ground.

Once a week, if one of your sites gained a flight, DroneFlow emails you what changed: the cut, fill and net volume since the last comparable flight, the acreage measured, and a link straight into that site’s timeline. Sites are worked out from the ground your flights actually cover, so repeat visits to one job group themselves without you filing anything.

It would rather say nothing than say something wrong. Two captures from the same day are a reprocess, not progress, so no volume is quoted. Neither is one between a raw-photo reconstruction and a processed export — those surfaces are built differently, and differencing them measures the pipelines as much as the ground. It compares like with like, reaching past a same-day re-upload to the last flight that genuinely matches.

When flights don’t line up well enough to measure, it says so and tells you why rather than inventing a number. And if there is nothing worth reporting, no email goes out at all. Every one of them carries an unsubscribe link.

Pick any 2 to 8 finished flights of a site and open the Timeline, and there is now a Measure progress button. It reports the cut, fill and net volume for each period — flight to flight — as a chart and a table, with a running total across the whole job. Until now a volume needed exactly two flights and a downloaded PDF.

Every period is measured over the same footprint: the ground all the selected flights share. That matters more than it sounds — if each period were measured over whatever its own two flights happened to cover, a bigger number could just mean a bigger area, and the periods would not be comparable at all.

It still refuses to guess. A period whose surfaces do not line up is reported as not measurable rather than given a plausible number, and the running total breaks there instead of quietly pretending nothing moved. Draw a boundary with Measure an area first and every period is measured inside it. As always, volume change between flights without shared ground control is approximate.

Projects now ship LandXML surfaces alongside the DXF and Shapefile contours — the format Civil 3D, Trimble Business Center, Carlson and grade-control boxes read. Contours are for looking at; a surface is what a dozer can actually be given.

You get the measured ground as a TIN. If you also uploaded a design surface, you get a distance-to-grade surface with it — positive means the site sits above design and has to be cut to reach grade — and, when your design arrived as a GeoTIFF, a LandXML copy of it so your engineer’s software can open the thing they sent you.

They come out on the same grid as your other CAD exports, so set the CAD export grid once and everything matches. This applies to projects processed from now on — reprocess an older one if you want its surfaces too.

The steps that teach the map tools were the hardest ones to read, because the lesson in each is a movement rather than a screen. Four of them now carry a short silent clip that simply does the thing in front of you.

Watch an area get drawn corner by corner, with the point count and the acreage updating underneath — then a corner dragged, and the figure changing with it. Watch a distance measured along a road, and a site boundary imported from a GeoJSON and land on the map as ordinary markup you can edit and export again.

Nothing about the product changed here and there is nothing new to switch on — these are tools you already have, explained in the one way that actually fits them. The rest of the tutorial still highlights your own live screen rather than a recording, which is why only these four steps got clips.

Last release said a GeoPackage with true curve geometry would be refused. It isn’t any more. Circular arcs, compound curves and curved polygon boundaries come in and are drawn as curves — the arc frontage on a lot, a cul-de-sac, the toe of a pit.

They are drawn as fine line work rather than as true arcs, because a web map has no arc of its own; at any zoom you would read a site plan at, a curve looks like a curve. It is the same treatment your DXF arcs have always had.

And if one shape in a drawing still can’t be read, the rest of the file now loads anyway and the overlay’s row tells you how many were left out. Before, a single odd shape could turn away the whole upload.

QGIS saves to GeoPackage by default, so that is what most people have. You can now upload a .gpkg as a site-plan overlay: every vector layer in the file comes in at once, each one labelled with its layer name, and its attributes come with it. There is nothing to fill in — a GeoPackage records its own coordinate system, so unlike a DXF we never have to ask. Raster tile layers are skipped, and the overlay’s row says so rather than leaving you to wonder.

If you tried a DXF and it would not load, try it again. Drawings saved by AutoCAD and Civil 3D were coming back as “no drawable linework” — the file was fine every time, and we were reading it wrongly. That is fixed. Nothing about your export needs to change.

Site plan overlays now take the drawing as it comes: a DXF, or a zipped Shapefile, alongside the KML and GeoJSON they already took. No more round trip through QGIS to convert a file before you can look at it.

Projected drawings are converted for you. A shapefile carries its coordinate system in its .prj; for a DXF we ask, because a DXF genuinely does not record one — enter the zone off the title block (EPSG:2237, or just 2237). We refuse rather than guess: a plan drawn in the wrong place is worse than one that did not load, because it looks like it worked.

Your CAD layer names come through, closed shapes become clickable areas, and curves are drawn as curves. Text and dimensions are not placed — an overlay draws linework — and the overlay's row tells you how many were left out.

Your client’s engineer works on one coordinate system — usually a State Plane zone — and a drawing on any other grid does not line up with the rest of their drawing set. There is now a CAD export grid box on New project and on Reprocess: put their zone in it and the DXF and Shapefile contours are written on it.

Type EPSG:2237, or just 2237 — the number off their plan is enough. Leave it blank and the CAD files come out in your survey’s own coordinate system, exactly as before.

It changes the CAD files and nothing else — the map, the measurements and the elevations are untouched. Reprocess is usually where you will want it, since the zone tends to be settled days after the flight.

A drone can only measure a pile as it sits — the loose volume — and that is rarely the number you get paid on. Enter a swell % on a stockpile and it now also reports the in-ground (bank) volume it was dug from, which on most earthwork contracts is the excavation pay quantity. Add a shrinkage % and it reports the compacted volume it will make in a fill.

Add a rate and say what it is per — ton, loose, bank or compacted — and each pile reports a value. The basis is asked for rather than assumed because it changes the answer: at $8 a bank yard a 1,250-yard pile is worth $8,000, not $10,000.

Blank factors are left blank. We ship preset densities because a material's weight barely moves, but swell and shrinkage depend on the compaction and moisture on your job — so those are your figures or they are absent, never a guess.

Money follows a new currency setting on the Account page. It is a label only: nothing is ever converted.

Tick Allow iframe when you create a client link and you get a line of HTML to paste into your own site. The map then sits on your domain, under your header, with your branding — a live site map on a project page or a portfolio instead of a screenshot that goes stale.

The embedded map can be panned, zoomed and measured, but not written to: visitors cannot draw, edit, delete or comment. A page on the open web is read by anyone who finds it, and you don't want strangers leaving notes in your project.

Sending the same link to a client still works exactly as before — they can annotate and comment. Only the copy inside your website is restricted. Revoking the link takes the embed down wherever it was pasted.

Measure a distance between two points and you now get the grade between them as well — the check you make when you want to know whether a run of pipe, a haul road or a parking bay came in on spec. Until now Distance told you how far, and nothing about the fall.

Sections gained the same thing sideways: each section reports its cross-slope, the fall across a road or berm rather than along it.

Every slope in the app now reads three ways at once — 2.0%, 1.1°, and for anything steep enough to be specified that way, the 3.0:1 ratio a batter is drawn in. Profile already showed a grade; it now shows all three.

Distance reads the grade off the ground where your project has a bare-earth model, so a tree beside your line doesn't become part of the slope.

Run your cursor along an elevation profile and it now follows you: a marker traces the matching point on the map, and the readout gives the station, the ground and surface elevation there, and the height between them — the number you actually want for a stockpile, a canopy or a building.

Where we know the coordinate system your survey was flown on, it also reads out the easting and northing on that grid, labelled with it, so it can go straight into a drawing.

The measuring tools got the same attention: drawing an area now tells you the area, and any point you have placed — on an area or a volume outline — can be dragged, so one misplaced click no longer means starting the shape again.

Every measurement in DroneFlow can now be read in metric instead of imperial. One setting on the Account page switches the whole app — distances, areas, elevations, profiles, volumes, stockpiles, flight comparisons and every PDF report.

Until now everything was feet, cubic yards and acres with no way to change it, which made a site surveyed in metres read back in units nobody on it uses.

It changes how numbers are shown, never what was measured, so you can switch back and forth as often as you like and nothing is recalculated. Owners and admins can set it.

The elevation datum is now a choice when you create a project, not a NAVD88 yes/no. Alongside NAVD88 you can pick EGM2008 — the global geoid — or EGM96.

This matters if you fly outside the United States. NAVD88 covers the Lower 48 and Alaska and nothing else, so until now a site in New Zealand, Canada, Australia or the UK could not get above-sea-level heights at all — only raw GPS heights, which read tens of metres off. EGM2008 works everywhere.

DroneFlow now measures which datums reach your site and offers only those, so you can't spend a processing run on a conversion that was never going to apply. Every project page also states which datum its elevations are actually on.

Pins you drop on the 3D model are now saved to the project. They are the same pins as the ones on the 2D map and the same ones your client sees on a share link — not a separate set living in your browser that you had to export and email back.

It reads both ways: lines and areas drawn on the map now appear draped over the 3D model, so the flat view and the model finally show the same site.

Raw-photo projects now accept photos from a DSLR or a phone, not just a drone — useful for a stockpile you can walk around or a facade you can't fly over. PNG works alongside JPEG, and you can mix drone and ground photos in one upload.

RAW (.dng, .cr2, .nef) and HEIC still need exporting to JPEG first. The upload page now says so plainly if you pick some, instead of quietly leaving them out.

Every pin, line and area now has a comment thread. Hit 💬 Comment on the map toolbar and click a spot to drop a pin and start a conversation there, or open the thread on markup that already exists.

Anyone who can see the project can comment — including read-only team members and clients on a share link. That's the point: the reason you send a map to a client is to hear what they notice. Nobody can edit anyone else's words, and you can remove a comment if you need to.

Anything you draw on the map can now leave it. ↓ Export on the map toolbar downloads your pins, lines and areas as GeoJSON, KML for Google Earth, a zipped Shapefile for ArcGIS or Civil 3D, or CSV — so a boundary you drew here opens in the tool your client or surveyor actually works in.

↑ Import goes the other way. Upload a GeoJSON, KML/KMZ, CSV or zipped Shapefile and every feature becomes an ordinary annotation you can move and relabel. Shapefiles are reprojected for you, so a State Plane file from a surveyor lands in the right place instead of the middle of the ocean.

Clients on a share link get the Export button too — they can pull the boundary into their own GIS without asking you for a file.

Raw-photo projects can now take ground control points: upload the gcp_list.txt from WebODM's GCP editor, Metashape or POSM on the new Control step, and the reconstruction is pinned to your surveyed coordinates instead of relying on the drone's GPS alone.

The file is checked the moment you pick it — bad or half-made files are caught before the upload, and marks on photos you didn't select are flagged rather than silently ignored. Control constrains the map; to measure accuracy, hold some points back as checkpoints.

The New project page now walks you through one step at a time — Name, Files, Coordinates, Review — instead of asking everything at once. Ticking raw drone photos adds the Build and Ground control steps; questions that don't apply to your upload are skipped entirely.

The Review step restates every answer — file, size, build, control, coordinate system, datum — before the upload starts, so a wrong datum gets caught before the expensive part, not after.

The shared map and the accuracy certificate now carry your logo, your colour and your name instead of ours — on every project you already have, not just new ones.

There are nine controls for how the logo sits: size, position, nudge, trim, backdrop and more, with live previews on both pages. Use Trim edges if your logo looks small or off-centre, and Backdrop if it disappears against the dark map or the white certificate.

Logo uploads now accept files up to 5 MB, instead of 512 KB.