How Omniris organizes every flight around the places you fly, and how the Site Navigator lets you walk a site through its flight dates, compare them, measure what changed and share what you found.
Drone work is about places. You fly the same quarry every month, the same field every week of the season, the same roof before and after a storm. What you want to know is usually not "what does this flight show?" but "what has changed at this place since last time?"
Omniris organizes your work around those places. A site is one place you fly, filed under the customer it belongs to. Two tools work with sites:
Name the site and customer when you start a job. When it finishes, its results are filed under that site automatically, beside every earlier flight of the same place.
Draw or import a site's boundaries once. They can appear on every map in Omniris, and they become the zones for statistics and measurements.
Pick a site and its flight dates and layers line up on the map. Turn dates and layers on and off, and blend them with opacity sliders.
Compare two dates by eye or by the numbers: material added and removed, or how a crop index rose or fell. Saved volumes are measured again on every new flight.
A change alert watches a site and emails you when a new flight changes it by more than you set.
Send anyone a live, read-only view of a site: the dates and layers you choose, with an optional password and expiry, revocable at any time.
A customer is who the work is for: a farm, a contractor, a utility, your own company. A site is one place you fly for that customer: a field, a pit, a solar plant, a building. A site does not need a customer. The same site name can be used under two different customers, and the two stay separate sites.
Each site has:
| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| Name and description | How the site is listed everywhere in Omniris. Names can be up to 120 characters. |
| Customer | The customer the site belongs to, or none. |
| Type | Agricultural, Solar, Roof or Other. It decides which specialist tools and wording the site gets (below). |
| Boundaries | One or more polygons that mark out the site, its fields, blocks, roofs or areas, each with its own name, colour and data. |
| Picture | An optional image of the site, or a logo for a customer. |
| RTK settings | How RTK positions from flights at this site should be read. |
| Owner | You alone, or one of your organizations, which decides who can see and change it. |
| Flights | Every map, elevation model, index map, thermal map and 3D model made from flights of the site, grouped by flight date. |
| Type | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Agricultural (the default) | Adds zonal analytics: crop statistics for each polygon and each flight. |
| Solar (PV plant) | Sets the thermal hotspot search to the solar-panel standard: a cell 18 °F (10 °C) or more above the panels around it, down to the size of one cell, graded by class. Words the stitch report for PV inspection. |
| Roof / building envelope | Words the hotspot search and the stitch report for roof-moisture surveys, where warm areas after sunset are candidates for wet insulation. |
| Other | No specialist tools or wording; thermal searches use the general settings. |
The type is shown under the site's name and can be changed at any time.
Open the Site Manager from the location-pin icon in the main navigation. It has three levels: your customers, one customer and its sites, and one site. A back arrow returns you to the level above.
Each customer is a card showing its name, how many sites it has and, for an organization's customer, a badge naming the organization. Sites without a customer are listed in a section of their own. New Customer asks for a name, an optional description and, when you belong to an organization, whether the customer is yours or the organization's. You can also link the customer to the Omniris account of a person at that customer, by email address.
Opening a customer shows its sites, each with its number of polygons, and New Site. You can edit the customer, give it a logo, or delete it.
A site's own screen brings together everything about that place:
You do not have to create a site before you fly it. When a stitch or 3D model job that names a site finishes, the site and customer are created for you if they do not exist yet. Older site names that have no site record are listed as Unmanaged sites (from stitching); Adopt turns one into a full site, and Adopt all does them all at once.
A site's boundaries are polygons: shapes on the map that mark out the site, or the fields, blocks, roofs or areas inside it. Each polygon has a label, an optional description (shown when you hover over it on a map), a colour, and its area in acres.
A polygon is a single outline. Holes in an imported shape are not kept.
Each polygon can carry custom fields: named slots for whatever matters about that field, block or roof, such as its crop, owner, roof type or yield. A field is Text, a whole number (Integer) or a decimal (Floating point), and has one value for the Whole Site or a separate value Per Date, so you can track a number from flight to flight.
To reuse a set of fields, save it as a field set and load it onto other polygons. When the polygon already has fields, you choose whether to skip names that already exist, add everything, or replace what is there. A field set you change later can be pushed to the sites built from it.
You fill in the values on the map: in the Site Navigator, click a polygon to open its data block (see "Layers and basemaps").
You rarely file anything by hand. Work joins a site in three ways.
The stitch dialog and the 3D model dialogs ask for a site name and a customer name, offering the names you have used before. The phone app's stitch action has the same field, with Pick existing site…. Using the same name for every flight of a place is what lines those flights up in the Site Navigator.
When the job finishes, every result is labelled with the site, the customer, the flight date (the day the earliest photo was taken) and its layer type (colour map, elevation model, NDVI, thermal and so on). The job is linked to the site, which is created for you if it is new. Nothing is filed for a job that fails.
Change Site Name on a stitch's results folder re-files those results under another site. Renaming or merging sites in the Site Manager re-files everything under them.
A national aerial survey, a satellite scene or an older contractor's map can join a site's timeline too. On any map-aligned GeoTIFF in your vault, choose Add to Site as Imagery and give:
The file itself is not changed or re-projected, so its fingerprint remains the evidence. You need permission to change the file, and the file must already have a map position.
RTK (real-time kinematic) drones correct their GPS positions to within centimetres using corrections from a base station or a correction network. Those positions are only meaningful if you know which reference frame the corrections were in, and the photos do not record it. So each site states it once, on its RTK settings card:
| Setting | Choices |
|---|---|
| RTK correction frame | WGS84/ITRF; NAD83(2011); NAD83(PA11) for Hawaii and American Samoa; ETRF2000 for Poland |
| RTK base | Network / known point (a correction network, or a base over a surveyed point); or Autonomous (a base on an unsurveyed point) |
| NAD83(2011) epoch | California sites only: 2010.00 or 2017.50, the two dates at which California publishes its coordinates |
The companion paper From design to measured progress explains how the RTK settings are used when flights are checked against a design.
Every customer and site is owned either by one person or by one organization. The owner is chosen when it is created; a site under a customer takes the customer's owner.
| Who | Personal site | Organization's site |
|---|---|---|
| The person who owns it | Sees and changes it | — |
| Organization manager | No access | Sees and changes it, and sets its RTK settings |
| Organization pilot | No access | Sees and changes it |
| Organization viewer | No access | Sees it, without changing it |
| Anyone else | No access | No access |
People whose account has the read-only Viewer role do not see the Site Manager. Access to a site comes from the organization; there is no separate member list for each site. To show a site to someone outside, share a Site Navigator view (see "Sharing a view") or share its folders.
Tick Show on all maps on a site and its boundaries appear across Omniris: on the map of a folder's imagery, in the Site Navigator, on job maps and on shared Site Navigator links. Each polygon is drawn in its own colour, with its name.
A polygon button on the map cycles the boundaries through three states: full (a light fill, outline and name), outlines only, and hidden. Your browser remembers the choice for the next time you open a map.
The map also shows a marker for every site you can see. Click one to open that site in the Site Navigator. A button beside the Site Navigator's button shows or hides the markers.
The Site Navigator is a panel on the Omniris map. It shows one site at a time, with every flight of that site laid out by date and layer, and the tools to work with them.
The map moves to the site and shows its earliest flight, starting with the colour map (RGB) when there is one. The panel stays open while you work on the map; only its × closes it. A smaller version, for picking a site's dates and layers, also appears on the site's screen in the Site Manager.
Turn flight dates on and off, each with its own opacity.
Colour maps, bands, indices, elevation, thermal and terrain analysis, each with its own opacity.
Roads, buildings and other reference maps, and imported design models, drawn over every date.
The site's current construction schedules, each opening as a Gantt chart.
Fade, swipe and blink between dates, or compute the change.
On agricultural sites, each polygon shaded by its crop index.
Every saved volume on the site, re-measured with each flight.
The site's findings, listed and pinned on the map.
The header has the boundary button (full, outlines only, hidden), the share button, and a button that zooms back to the whole site. A line at the foot counts the overlays on the map.
The Dates list shows every flight date of the site, oldest first. Tick a date to put that flight on the map; tick several to stack them. There is no limit on how many dates can be on at once.
Small buttons on each date open that flight's folder in your vault, open its 3D model when the flight made one (see "3D"), and, for a multispectral flight, show how closely its colour and multispectral maps lined up. A flight that has been cropped to a field or parcel has a cropped button that shows the cropped maps in place of the originals.
The Layers list shows every kind of map the site's flights produced, by its short name, each with its own opacity slider. They fall into these groups:
| Group | Layers | What they show |
|---|---|---|
| Colour and bands | RGB, MULTISPECTRAL, and the red-edge and near-infrared bands | The site as photographed, and single bands of a multispectral camera |
| Vegetation indices | NDVI and NDRE from the stitch; GNDVI, SAVI, EVI and the other Band Analytics indices you have saved | Plant health and vigour, as a colour scale |
| Elevation | DSM and DTM as shaded relief; the same models as true heights, coloured by elevation | The surface (everything on the ground) and the bare ground. The true heights are what measurements and comparisons use |
| Thermal | THERMAL, CWSI | Temperature, and crop water stress |
| Terrain analysis | SLOPE, ASPECT, CONTOURS, PONDING, DRAINAGE | How steep the ground is, which way it faces, lines of equal height, where water would pond and the paths it would take |
When a multispectral flight also made a separate colour map, the Site Navigator shows the colour job's elevation models for that date, so one surface model and one terrain model are drawn and they line up with the colour map. Both remain in your vault.
Under the site's layers, the map shows a basemap of your choice: Satellite, Hybrid (satellite with roads and place names, the default), Streets, Light or Dark. The choice is remembered.
Click one of the site's polygons on the map to open its data block: its name and description, the site's type, its area in acres, its location, and the average height the drone flew above the ground there on the dates you have on. Below that are its custom fields, in two columns: values for the whole site, and values for each date that is on. Type a value to change it, if you can change the site. When zonal analytics has been run on the site, the data block also lists the polygon's average for each crop index on each date. Below that, the site's saved volumes are listed for each date that is on.
On an agricultural site, the Zonal Analytics section shades each polygon on the map by a crop index: its average, how even it is, how it compares with the rest of the field, or its trend over the season. The companion paper Maps you can measure describes zonal analytics in full.
Imported design models for the site can be drawn over any flight, coloured by object type; click an object to see its details. The Progress section lists the site's construction schedules. The companion paper From design to measured progress covers both.
A reference layer is a map of things that stay put from one flight to the next: roads, buildings, parcels, pipelines, facilities, points of interest. Drawn over your imagery, it tells you what you are looking at. A reference layer has no date. It sits in its own Reference group in the Site Navigator and draws over whichever dates you are viewing.
GeoJSON, KML, KMZ, a Shapefile packed in a ZIP, and GML are accepted. Every line, area, hole and point is kept, along with each feature's attributes.
Each reference layer is listed with its colour and number of features. All are off when a site opens; tick one to draw it. Lines are drawn in the layer's colour, areas are outlined with a light wash of it, and points are dots. Names are drawn along roads and inside areas. Click a feature to see its attributes. The pencil on a row renames or recolours the layer for everyone who can see the file. Reference layers are not included on shared Site Navigator links.
Dated imagery from elsewhere, such as a national aerial survey or a satellite scene, is added differently: as a date on the site's timeline (see "How work joins a site").
The Compare section answers the question a site exists for: what changed between two flights? Pick an earlier date (A), a later date (B) and a layer, then choose how to compare:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Visual | Two dates on screen at once. Fade from one to the other, drag a Curtain across to swipe between them, or Blink between them. Works for any layer. |
| Difference | Measures the change. For elevation: the material added, the material removed and the net change, each with its uncertainty. For a vegetation index, or a crop water stress map made on both dates: the average change, and how much of the area improved, declined or stayed the same against a threshold you set (0.05 by default). Thermal maps are compared visually; a computed temperature difference is not offered. Over the whole survey, one polygon, a saved measurement or an area you draw. Show change layer colours the map by where the ground rose and fell, or the index rose and fell. |
| Design | One survey against an imported design model: where the ground is above the design and where it is below. |
Each comparison is graded for how well the two surveys line up, because an offset between them looks like change. The results can be printed or saved as a PDF report, or downloaded as a spreadsheet (CSV), and Alert me turns the comparison into a standing watch (see "Change alerts"). Comparing is free. The companion paper Maps you can measure explains the comparison, its grades and its limits in full.
When both dates' colour maps have been through AI object detection with the same model and the same list of objects, AI change (in the Visual mode) lists the objects that appeared, disappeared or stayed, and draws them on the map in green, red and grey. It lines the two dates up using fixed structures such as buildings and tanks, never vehicles or equipment. It refuses dates whose resolutions differ by more than two times, because the detector finds more at the finer one. Appearances and disappearances are recorded as findings. The comparison itself costs nothing; the detection runs it reads were charged when they ran. The companion paper Findings you can act on covers it.
The Map Tools button on the map measures distance, area, a profile (a cross-section of the ground along a line) and volume (the material above or below a base you choose, inside a boundary you draw), from the site's elevation models. The companion paper Maps you can measure describes each tool, the volume bases and the uncertainty shown with every volume.
Save a volume measurement on a site and it becomes a standing question: how much material is inside this boundary now? Omniris answers it on every flight of the site, without anyone pressing a button:
In the Site Navigator, the Volumes section lists each saved measurement with one line per date that is on: the volume with its plus-or-minus, the tonnage when you gave a material, and a flag when part of the boundary had no data. A date not yet measured offers Evaluate. The chart button shows volume over time; hover over a point for its date and value. The crosshairs zoom the map to the boundary. On the site's screen in the Site Manager, the same measurements have a printable report each and a spreadsheet (CSV) of every result.
A finding is a recorded issue at a place on the site, with a severity and a stage. The Site Navigator's Findings section lists the site's findings, most severe first, filtered by stage (open, untriaged, active, resolved, dismissed) and severity, and shows them on the map. Click one to go to it and open its full record. New finding here records a new one at a point or over an area you draw. The companion paper Findings you can act on covers findings in full.
When a flight also made a 3D model (a textured mesh or a Gaussian splat), its date in the Site Navigator shows a cube button. Click it to open the model in the 3D viewer; when the flight made more than one, pick which. The companion paper Digital twins you can see and measure describes the 3D viewer and what you can do in it.
A change alert watches a site for you. Set it up once from a comparison, and every time a new flight of the site arrives, Omniris compares it with the flight before and emails you if the change passes the line you set.
Run a Difference comparison on the site, then click Alert me. The alert keeps the comparison's layer and area, and asks what to watch:
| Layer | Watch for |
|---|---|
| Elevation | Net volume change, Material added or Material removed, past a volume you set |
| Vegetation index | Mean index change past a value you set, or the Share of the area that changed past a percentage you set |
You need to be able to see the site to set an alert on it. Each person can have up to 25 active alerts, and each site up to 5.
A situation report is one PDF that tells the story of a site between two dates, ready to hand to someone who will never open Omniris. In the Site Navigator's Compare section, choose the two dates and a layer of map images in the Visual mode, pick a Language (English or Polish) and click Generate report. When it is ready, Download PDF; it is also saved to your vault, in the later image's folder (or, if you cannot add files there, a Reports folder of your own), with its own custody record.
The site, the two dates, when it was made and by whom.
The later imagery with the area's outline and the site's reference layers, a scale bar and a north arrow.
The two dates side by side, at the same scale and without colour adjustment; the elevation change when both dates have a surface model; and the AI change counts, with how the dates were lined up.
The objects that changed, each pictured on both dates, and every other open finding in the area that you can see, unreviewed ones first.
For each image: where it came from, its capture date, its custody history and fingerprint, how it was processed, and a certificate anyone can verify.
How the comparison was made, and what it cannot claim.
The report is a plain PDF, so it never prints encrypted imagery: an encrypted image is shown as "Imagery unavailable", and a report is not made when the later image or its folder is encrypted. The companion paper Evidence you can prove describes custody records and certificates.
A Site Navigator link gives someone without an Omniris account a live, read-only Site Navigator for one site. They open it in a browser; there is nothing to install. Use the share button in the Site Navigator's header, or Public Link on a folder and choose to share it as a Site Navigator view.
| You choose | Options |
|---|---|
| Dates | Any of the site's flight dates. Share future flights adds every later flight of the site automatically. |
| Layers | Any layer type present on those dates. Sharing an elevation layer also shares its measurements and volumes. |
| Source images | Whether the photos each shared flight was made from are included. |
| Findings | Off unless you tick it. Recipients then see the complete record of each finding, including people's names and comments. |
| Access level | View Only (the default), or View + Download, which also lets the recipient download the shared maps. |
| Maximum detail | Full resolution, or about 2 in (5 cm), 4 in (10 cm) or 1 ft (30 cm) per pixel. This limits how far the recipient can zoom in; measurements still use the full-resolution data. |
| Password | Optional. Ten wrong tries in fifteen minutes locks a visitor out for a while; changing the password signs out everyone who used the old one. |
| Expiry | Never, 1, 7 (the default), 30 or 90 days. |
Everything else is refused with "Not available on a shared view": saving anything, changing anything, other folders, 3D models, reference layers, photo locations, AI change and the situation report. Encrypted layers are never shared.
Orion, the Omniris assistant, knows what you are looking at. While the Site Navigator is open, Orion is told which site and customer you picked, which dates are on and which layers are shown, so you can ask about "this site" without naming it. It checks that you are allowed to see the site first.
Orion sees only your own data. It answers in the chat; it does not change your sites or open the Site Navigator for you.
| What | Formats | From |
|---|---|---|
| Site boundaries | GeoJSON, KML, KMZ, Shapefile | The site's screen in the Site Manager |
| A comparison | PDF report, spreadsheet (CSV) | Compare's Difference results |
| Saved volumes | Printable report for each; spreadsheet (CSV) of every result on the site | The site's screen in the Site Manager |
| Situation report | PDF, saved to your vault | Compare's Visual mode |
| Findings | GeoJSON, CSV, KML | The Findings view |
| The maps themselves | GeoTIFF, JPG or PNG, CAD files, a STAC bundle, or published to ArcGIS | The flight's folder, opened from its date in the Site Navigator |
The companion paper Maps you can measure describes the map downloads and exports.
| Where | What you get |
|---|---|
| Web | Everything in this paper. |
| Desktop application | The same Site Manager and Site Navigator, built from the same code. Two differences: a comparison's PDF report and spreadsheet are made in the web application; and files you export, such as boundaries and volume spreadsheets, are saved where you choose with your computer's own save dialog. |
| Phone app | Site names, not site management. The stitch action asks for the site name, with Pick existing site…, and each finding shows its site. On sites with a current design, Site Progress shows the site's map and lets you record progress on its design objects, with photos and notes, even offline. The Site Manager and the Site Navigator are not in the phone app. |
| Shared link | A read-only Site Navigator for one site, for anyone you send it to (see "Sharing a view"). |
On the phone, a site can be saved for offline use: its design objects and the street map around it are kept on the phone, and progress recorded without a connection is sent when the phone is back online. The satellite map needs a connection. The companion paper From design to measured progress covers progress recording.
The Site Manager and the Site Navigator are part of Omniris in every deployment, and work the same way in each. Comparisons, automatic volume measurements, change alerts and situation reports run on the deployment's own servers.
| Deployment | Where your sites and maps live |
|---|---|
| Omniris cloud (Microsoft Azure) | Omniris's cloud storage and servers |
| Omniris cloud (Google Cloud) | Omniris's cloud storage and servers |
| Data center edition and on-premises | The site's own storage and servers |
Draw each pile once. Every monthly flight measures it again, with a chart of volume over time and an email when material moves more than you expect.
Fields as polygons, crop indices per field per flight, your own data such as crop and variety on each block, and a weekly view of what is improving and what is not.
Flights over the design, cut and fill against it, the project schedule beside the maps, and a live view the client can open without an account.
A site typed as solar sets the hotspot search to the panel standard; thermal flights line up date by date to show whether a fault is new.
Before-and-after flights of the same roof, compared side by side, with findings pinned where the damage is.
Outside imagery and your own flights on one timeline, roads and buildings drawn over them, and one situation report for the two dates that matter.