Settings of photos in Ground Control window

[EvanThoms]

In the Photos pane of the Ground Control window with 'View Source' checked, what exactly are the uses of the options in the right-click context menu? That is, whether photos are enabled, disabled, checked, unchecked, and whether I delete the XYZ fields or leave them with values?

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Evan,

Checked markers/cameras in the Ground Control pane are used during model georeferencing (Update button) and optimization (Optimize button). For unchecked instances the source coordinates are not taken into account when mentioned actions are performed.

Disabled photos are not used during Build Geometry and Build Texture stages.

Removing source values means the loss of data. For such photos Ground Control preselection could not be applied at Align Photos stage and they are matched with all the others photos in the set, thus increasing the processing time.

[EvanThoms]

Thanks Alexey. That's what I was thinking. One more thing, if there are photos with registration errors that are so bad that I want to remove them from the georeferencing, does it follow that I would probably want to disable them from building geometry? Does the registration error propagate into the geometry?

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello Evan,

Errors shown in the Ground Control pane indicates the difference between source data and positions estimated by PhotoScan. So if the point cloud was optimized (for example, to remove "bowl-effect" for large planar model) and it looks correctly the errors could be caused by errors in the source values and the photos are not supposed to be disabled.
But if the image has obviously wrong position that could not be corrected by optimization such photos should be unchecked and disabled or the alignment for them should be reset.