Whether you're a pilot or a self-flying customer, understanding how to upload your data is a crucial part of the process in completing your mission. This support article will show you how to upload your data to the Sitemark platform.

Some pre-requisites to uploading your data are:

Once you have completed these steps you will be able to move on to uploading your data.

How to add your drone and accessories to the platform.

How to plan your flights on the Platform.

How to upload both thermal and RGB images to the platform.

4. RTK RGB Image Uploader and Accuracy Checking

How to upload your RTK RGB images to the Platform.

If this is the first time you will be uploading data to the Sitemark platform, you will need to add the drone equipment and accessories you used for the flight to the platform.

You can do this by clicking on the equipment button on the left panel of the platform shown in red below.

Once you have located the equipment tab, you will need to add your equipment. First, add your drone used to conduct the flight, you can do this by clicking the Add drone button located in the top right of the screen.

Next, you will need to add in the accessory used for the flight; navigate to the accessory menu by clicking on Accessories on the panel on the left side. You can then click the Add accessory button on the top right to add them.

As a pilot or self-flying customer, the first interaction with an operation will be in the assigned status. From assigned to upload status, you are responsible for the movement of the operation through the stages.

To progress to the next planning stage, you can click on the operation on the site overview page to be taken to the next process step.

It is time to plan your inspection to indicate the expected flight date of this operation. Below are the options available to you while the operation is Assigned.

When you click on the plan flights button shown above, you will be redirected to the page shown in the screenshot below. Before confirming the planning, you must fill in each field with the correct information.

It's important to know that some drones/accessories are only supported for certain data products. This will likely be the reason if you see a warning that you do not have a support accessory or drone. You can find the full list of support hardware and the supported data products here.

Once you are happy with the information you have entered and it has been accepted by the platform, the plan mission button at the bottom of the screen will turn green.

If this is not the case, please check the information you have entered to ensure each field is filled in.

Once the status has been updated to flown, you can upload the photos by clicking the orange Upload photos button shown below.

Once you have arrived to the upload screen you can begin selecting the photos that you want to upload. There are some tips and tricks that you can find below and a video explaining how to use the uploader here.

When doing the validation checks, the platform will attempt to understand the sensor you used for the inspection. If the sensor exif data matches the planned sensor in the platform you will be able to continue.

For drones that have multiple RGB sensors (any drone with a Wide and Zoom camera) or if the planned sensor information is incorrect, you will need to specify which camera was used for the inspection and update the sensor information. You can do this by selecting the sensor from the drop down list or typing the sensor name and select the correct sensor show in the screenshot below.

When uploading data to the platform, several validation checks are carried out to ensure that the correct data is being uploaded.

This modal will help you understand what might be going wrong with your upload. There are 3 key areas in which the validation checks take place:

Within each of these, there are category specific checks that will give you more information on what might be going wrong with your upload to help you trouble shoot.

These checks can have 3 different results:

The next section will explain in more detail what to do if your uploads have failed and you cannot continue with your upload.

Your uploads can fail for a number of reasons, the validation modal shown below will help you understand what went wrong and ideally how to fix it. If not we will also show you how to send the error notification to our Support team to be able to follow up.

Once you have been through the 3 different validation categories, you can use the information here to try and trouble shoot the issue with the upload.

An example of this might be that the images you have uploaded are outside of the operation boundaries (perhaps you selected the wrong upload folder). The simple solution here is to retry the upload with the correct data folder.

Another example might be that a number of images failed to upload during the upload process. This can happen due to intermittent connections with our storage center. If this happens you can simply click the 'Retry Failed Uploads' button.

If after going through the validation checks modal you are not able to resolve the upload issue, or the issue persists after trying to retry the failed uploads you can send the error information to Sitemark to better help you resolve the issue.

When an upload fails you can click the View Errors button and then in the screenshot below use the Contact Us button to send the error information to our support team.

If this is a data product that requires ground control points (eg. Solar Construction), you will also need to tag the GCPs and push the operation to processing at this point. You can follow this support article on how to do so.

Once all images are uploaded, Sitemark will perform the Quality Check on the data to ensure that the data is suitable. If it passes the Quality Check, we will process the data without any further contact.

If the data fails the quality check process, you will be sent an overview of why it has failed and a recommendation on how it can be fixed.