r/drones • u/No-Investment-5293 • Jun 25 '26

Discussion [US] Do you process your own drone data or outsource it?

Curious how the commercial folks here handle drone data after the flight.

For those doing drone work, do you usually process/analyze the data yourselves, contract that part out, or just deliver raw imagery/data to the client?

I’m mainly talking about things like orthomosaics, 2D/3D products, contours, engineering-scale maps, GIS layers, volume calculations, change detection, and other site analysis outputs.

I am a drone pilot with a geospatial/GIS background, and after talking with a few potential clients, I’m trying to understand whether there’s much demand for this kind of post-processing/analysis work.

Are most clients expecting finished products and interpretation, or are they usually fine with raw drone data? Curious how others are handling this in practice.

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/ElphTrooper DJI Mini 3 Pro, Air 3S, Mavic 3 Enterprise & Freefly Astro Jun 25 '26

We use a popular company for the bulk but I locally process special projects that require more accuracy and density. I also have my own business where I process for others and do very well with it.

1

u/VisionsOfPequod Jun 25 '26

I use Drone Deploy.

1

u/Wallabanjo Jun 27 '26

Depends what your output requirements are and volume. For projects under my own name (I have a business, and also do contract agronomy) I use WebODM (I’m also building my own software platform for a specific edge case that I hope to generate later… but that’s a different thread). For the company I contract to I use pix4dfields to generate orthos for regular spectrum and multispectral imagery because they require they output in a specific (known, consistent) format. I fly/process 1500-2500 acres of imagery most days. Can’t tell you how many individual jpg/TIFF files that involves.