Restarting Project After Many Cameras Were N/O - Seems Like A Circular Workflow

[PSBDave]

Using Free version...

Sometimes I think too many of my photos are tagged N/O. I would like some clarification on a previous answer to an older post on a similar subject.

In previous posts titled "N/O cameras" and "Unused (greyed out) Pictures", the implied solution is to go the camera panel where all of the photos are shown either color (oriented), or greyed out (N/O). Then right click and, in one post, Select All, and in the other post, Select All Not Oriented, then click New Project From Selected Cameras.

This sounds like it would work (that is, it sounds like it will force the routine to use all cameras), but, in the case where you Select All, the only thing that happens is you go back to the Wizard, which then runs the Camera Calibration with all the photos, and returns the same result - the same photos are N/O. If you do the same thing after Select All Not Oriented, then, not surprisingly I guess, the result is that all photos are N/O.

So what was the intent of the answers given? Is there a way to force using more pictures? Does it ever make sense to that?

I will try to link to one of the more complete posts, but I'm not sure how to do that...

Thanks,
Dave

[cam3d]

Hi Dave -

Once you've selected all images and started a New Project from Selected cameras, you need to adjust the alignment settings in the wizard, otherwise you'll continually get the same results!

Sometimes your images won't be good enough to align, no matter the settings. There are a lot of variables to consider when it comes to a reconstruction

- Cam

[PSBDave]

Thanks for the quick reply. So if I understand it, the only thing to be gained by selecting ALL images and starting a new project from selected cameras is that you don't have to re-browse or re-drag and drop your images into a brand new project. Is that correct? If that's the case, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me. In either case, one would logically want to change the orientation parameters to something a bit more intensive - either in the wizard or by going into advanced settings in an effort to get more cameras oriented. So you've really only saved the time required to re-drag and drop all the images.

Having said that, perhaps there is an advantage to this if one were using masks - **assuming** that starting a new project from selected images would preserve any existing masking. Any idea if that makes sense?

Finally, is there any scenario whereby one would select only the N/O images and start a new project from selected images? Seems like all this would do is discard the images that WERE previously oriented correctly, which doesn't make sense to me. I ask because this was recommended by Roberto (3DFlow Staff) in the 20 Nov 2017 topic I linked to in my original post.

"Yes you can already: right click on the left cameras tab -> select all not oriented -> new project from selected cameras"

Thanks again,
Dave

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi Dave,

yes, you are correct. That's all it does. you save time, which is trivial when you have few images, but can be nice when you have many images (and maybe spread out in many different subdirectories).

Masks are generated in Masquerade, so as long as you check the "use masks" in the first page of the wizard, masks will always be autoloaded if in the same directory.

Finally, yes, it happens quite often. For example when you have a dataset composed by two photosets, that have not enough overlap to be merged togheter. You can still create two different workspaces in the meantime. It's not super common but it may be helpful in many occasions.

[PSBDave]

Thank you for the concise and comprehensive reply. Its great to have such a responsive forum in place.