been doing residential and commercial roofing inspections for a contractor here in the midwest and honestly the flying part is the easy part at this point. its the deliverables that are killing me. the roofing companies want something they can actually hand to an insurance adjuster or a homeowner and half the time they dont really know what they want until they see something they dont want.

right now im shooting with a Phantom 4 RTK, doing orthomosaics in DroneDeploy and then annotating in there, but the output is kind of clunky and the contractors are always asking for just simple zoomed-in photos with circles drawn around the damage. so im basically doing the full photogrammetry pass and THEN going back and doing a separate manual close-up photo pass which doubles my time on site.

is there a smarter way to structure this or is everyone else just kind of doing the double pass too. feels ineffecient but i cant figure out how to get the annotation detail from an orthomosaic that a roofing guy with no software background can just look at and immediately understand

yeah the double pass thing is basically just the reality of roofing inspection work, at least in my experience. the orthomosaic is for you and for documentation, the close-ups are what the client actually cares about. ive stopped fighting it and just built both into my quote. takes me maybe an extra 15-20 minutes on a standard residential roof so its not a huge deal once you have a routine for it.

what helped me a lot was switching to Skydio Reconstruct for the 3D model on larger commercial jobs because the clients can actually spin it around themselves and that impresses them enough that they stop asking for me to circle everything manually. but for straight residential insurance stuff yeah its just photos with arrows, nobody wants a point cloud

honestly curious why youre using the RTK for roofing inspections specifically, seems like overkill unless you're doing large commercial flat roofs where the GSD actually matters for area calculations. for damage documentation on shingles or flashing the positional accuracy doesnt really change what the adjuster cares about. not crticizing just wondering if thats adding complexity that isnt paying off for your workflow