Getting Started with DataDelivery

What DataDelivery is

DataDelivery is an online platform that turns the photos your drone takes into professional map products. It runs entirely in your web browser — there’s nothing to download or install. You sign in, upload the photos your drone captured of a site, and the platform stitches and processes them into maps and 3D models you can measure, mark up, and share with your clients.

Here’s what you can make from a single set of drone photos:

• A stitched map — an orthophoto (a single, flat, map-accurate photo of the whole site, stitched together from all your individual drone images).
• 3D point clouds and models — a 3D version of the site you can spin around and fly through.
• Contour lines — the curved lines on a topographic map that connect points of equal elevation.
• Measurements — distance, height, and area measurements.
• Stockpile Measurements — for example, the volume of a stockpile (a pile of material like gravel or dirt).
• Marked-up images — photos with notes and shapes drawn on them to point out features or problems. Usually used in inspection workflows.
• Shareable reports — a clean web page you can send to a client to show off the results.

If you’ve never used drone data management software before, don’t worry — this guide walks you through every step, and the rest of this page gives you the mental model and vocabulary so everything else clicks into place.

The big picture: how it all fits together

No matter what your end goal is, every project follows the same five steps. Once this sequence makes sense, the whole platform makes sense:

1. Create a job — set up a project for one site.
2. Upload photos — drag your drone images into that job.
3. Process — let the platform turn those photos into map products.
4. View, measure & annotate — explore the results, take measurements, and add notes.
5. Share — send your client a polished report.

A few words in that list have specific meanings in DataDelivery. Learn these five and you’ll never feel lost:

• Job — a project for one site or property. Everything about that site lives inside its job.
• Capture — one dated visit to that site. If you fly the same property again next month, that’s a second capture inside the same job — which lets you compare the site over time.
• Files and folders — your uploaded photos, organized in folders inside a capture, just like on your computer.
• Products (or deliverables) — the finished outputs the platform makes from your photos: the orthophoto, point cloud, and so on.
• Report — a shareable web page you can build to present results to your client.

Key words you’ll see

You’ll meet these terms all over the platform. Here’s a one-line plain-English definition of each — you can come back to this list any time:

• Job — a project for one site; the container for everything about that location.
• Capture — one dated visit (flight) of a site; multiple captures let you track changes over time.
• Orthophoto — a single flat, map-accurate photo of the whole site, stitched from all your images.
• Point cloud — a 3D model made of millions of colored dots that recreate the site in three dimensions.
• DSM — a Digital Surface Model: an elevation map of the very top surface, including buildings, trees, and equipment.
• DTM — a Digital Terrain Model: an elevation map of the bare ground, with buildings and trees removed.
• Contours — lines on a map connecting points of equal elevation, like a topographic map.
• Annotation — a note, marker, or shape you draw on an image or map to point something out.
• Report — a shareable web page that presents your results to a client.
• Storage — the online disk space your uploaded files and products take up; your plan sets the limit.

Want the complete list? See the full glossary on the FAQ page.

An honest note about accuracy

Before you go further, one important thing to understand — and it’s worth saying up front:

With that out of the way, let’s get you signed up.

Create your account

Creating your account is free and quick — you can sign in and start using the platform immediately. It only takes a minute, and there’s no email verification step to wait on.

Log in

What this is: signing in to the account you just created.

Forgot your password?

Your first few minutes

The first time you sign in, a welcome window pops up that says Welcome to National Drone Services 👋 with a Create Personal Job button. That button is the fastest way to start your very first project — but before you create a job, you’ll want to pick a plan (covered next).

Look at the left sidebar. You’ll see a Personal Jobs section — this is your home base. It contains:

• Memberships — choose or manage your plan.
• Create Personal Job — start a new project.
• My Personal Jobs — the list of all your projects.
• Annotation Glossary — your reusable library of mark-up labels (you’ll use this later when annotating).

Everything in this guide happens inside Personal Jobs, so it’s worth getting comfortable with where it lives.

What’s next? First, pick a plan that fits how much you’ll use the platform — see Plans, Storage & Billing. Then create your first project in Creating & Organizing Jobs.