In projects with lots of images, I can’t find a fast way to preview CP candidates in order to find the best ones.
The only way I see to preview an image in a component is to open an image is by dragging from a 1D view to a 2D canvas – is there another way clever users are doing this?
I find I mostly use the 1D image list and drag images into a 2D view; but since it seems we can’t sort the list, it’s hard to find the image name I’m looking for out of thousands of images.
Any suggestions welcome!
Hi Kevin,
did you do an initial alignment? Then you can just click the cameras in the 3D view. If you want to activate a different 2D viewport than the blue one you need to press and hold 2 while clicking to display the camera in the green viewport. How to work with colored viewports see help or this forum. There are two more, purple and pink.
Thanks, Götz, but my question is about previewing candidate images for control points. As such, these views aren’t yet part of the reconstruction as they haven’t been aligned – and therefore aren’t visible in the 3D view to click on.
To restate, I’m looking for ways to efficiently sort through (e.g., quickly preview) the unaligned images in the project in order to find the right ones to manually establish control points.
If the 1D image list could be sorted, or searched, I could use an external program to preview the images (Lightroom, et cetera) and then find that imported image in RC among the thousands that appear in the 1D/2D image lists. Those lists are ordered by index, so they’re not helpful when trying to identify a file whose name we’re seeking.
I’ve exported the full image list from RC to manually search, but here I actually found that the list can sometimes differ from the 2D thumbnail views! Amazing and unexpected, but true.
I’ve just used excel in the past to do image sorting. and selecting images.
and then just re-load the image selection.
its not ideal. but at least the selection is saved and you can go back to it.
not sure if that would help your use.
i do agree, being able to sort 1d view would save a lot of time.
Hi Kevin,
yes, the sorting is a bit weird. I think it only works in 2D tile view. But that works rather well - you can sort by name for example. Another powerful tool is Similarity: just double click on an image and it will display similar ones successively. If you reduce the size of the tiles, then there are almost as many images on the screen as in 1D, more if you widen the window.
But I also think that doing it via 3D is quite easy. It needs an initial alignment, which is implied by your question: “image in a component”. And if not, what keeps you from doing an initial alignment? How would you otherwise determine where CPs are needed?
I agree that my mention of ‘component’ was confusing: to be clear, I am looking for images to add CPs to that will relate to a large number of successively aligned images in a ‘master’ component.
Good to know about the 2D sorting – I’ll try that!
I haven’t had any luck opening a 2D image by clicking or hold-clicking on a 3D camera frustum – I’m sure it’s a simple thing but I don’t seem to be able to do it. Is there any reference for that by chance?
Thanks again…
Ah, so you look in the master component and then need to go to unaligned images? Yes, that is a bit of a hassle. You can also cycle through the images by using left and right arrows on the keyboard, but it is strictly by index.
I simply left-click on a camera in 3D and it appears in the blue 2D window (when a grey frame is displayed around it). Drag&drop does not work in 3D, but in 2D tabs. Otherwise, look in the help for more thorough advice - it is not bad for basic stuff if you take a couple of minutes to browse through it.
Hi Kevin.
Select point selection tool and in 3D view select part of sparce cloud when you want set control points. use ctrl for add selection or shift for deselecting.
And press find images. RC will select all aligned images that have this points.
Thanks both Vlad and Götz…very good points.
I have been using the left/right keys to navigate but as Götz notes, that’s not too useful as the index won’t reflect a component’s images. Mostly I’m stuck dragging from 1D->2D to check on images.
I still can’t get an image to open when clicking on the 3D frustum, but I assume the target window needs to be selected after choosing 2D in the upper right. If anyone else knows what I’m missing, by all means chime in!
Ah, now I realize what’s going on. Trying with dragging (I never do that), I noticed that the color coding of the window disappears when an image is draged in. If you activate a window (blue frame) and press ctrl 1, blue will be assigned (small bit on the top right dropdown menu), which is the standard for left-click selection. With 2,3,4 you can do the same respectively.