Drone Site Journal

Building an Orthomosaic from Raw Drone Photos

Anyone who flies a drone for mapping quickly realizes that a handful of raw images is not the same as a usable map. Those individual photos, each taken from a different angle and position, need to be stitched together into a single, geometrically corrected image called an orthomosaic. An orthomosaic is essentially a seamless, top-down view of the area you flew, where every pixel corresponds to a real-world coordinate. This article walks through the main steps to turn your ra