Very poor and bad documentation

[ManyPixels]

Alexey Pasumansky, after writing 14,000 forum posts, have you ever considered rewriting the documentation properly rather than repeating the same things over and over again on the forum? I never found anything useful in the documentation. You may find this extreme, but it is the truth. The functions and their options are explained so briefly that the only way to know which option to choose in the processes is to stupidly try all the possible solutions and compare the result. And as far as the Python API goes, that's guesswork and prayer.

The log spits out dozens of lines, but we don't really understand what's going on. A complete documentation with an exhaustive description of the functions as well as the lines which appear in the log would be welcome and would free you up a lot of time to deal with the real problems!

Nobody will blame you if you focus your resources for 6 months on fixing everything that is problematic rather than adding new features with their new bugs. On the other hand, paying $3,500 to never get to the end of a project without having problems where there shouldn't be gives you a very bad image.

[Arie]

I'm not sure what you mean by never getting to the end of a project... I (and many others) have processed hundreds of projects without problems. Maybe the problem lies rather with your setup?

And are you aware of Agisofts Helpdesk Portal? There are tons of information, tutorials etc. there: https://agisoft.freshdesk.com/support/solutions
Of course better documentation is always desirable but I do find that between the user manual, helpdesk, social media groups and forum there is quite a lot of information out there.

[ManyPixels]

Hi Arie,

I mean, on big and challenging projects where you have to find your way to properly assemble you data, the documentation can't help.

Of course, as you said, there is a lot of informations on the helpdesk, social media groups and forum. All those informations should be packed in the documentation. I'm sure that after years working with Metashape you can use it like a charm, but I've never been so lost starting with a software. The worst thing is that many things have changed over time, they are not named the same and it makes the helpdesk, social media groups and forum incomplete or wrong.

The worst case is when you try to use the Python API, you'll find most of the solutions on the forum but once again, some function's name have changed. It wouldn't be very hard in Agisoft's side to concatenate all solutions given as examples in the python API doc, so that we won't have to search in the forum for ages. Most modern software have an online documentation structure which allow you to search efficiently trough the documentation and other discussion platforms at once. It's not the best example, but QGIS has a good documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/index.html
You can choose the version, make efficient search and you know what? It's open source, so they could just have told users to look at the user manual, helpdesk, social media groups and forum to solve their problem but they made a clean documentation instead!