Photo Altitude

[Fred Smyth]

Can Someone please tell me if the altitude record in a photo's GPS details is from the point of take off or above sea level.Thank You.

 

[old man mavic]

Can Someone please tell me if the altitude record in a photo's GPS details is from the point of take off or above sea level.Thank You.

i would hazard a guess that it is the height above the take off point ,as the drone does not show AGL in the app but i could be wrong

 

[53-63-6f-74-74]

Both GPS and relative altitude are in the exif info, but you have to dig a little bit, as most software will only show you the GPS elevation relative to sea level. A tool such as EXIFtool will extract an enormous amount of additional information, including relative altitude.

ExifTool by Phil Harvey

A command-line application and Perl library for reading and writing EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP, makernotes and other meta information in image, audio and video files. For Windows, MacOS, and Unix systems.

exiftool.org

There is also a GUI available separately.

ExifToolGUI

 

[sar104]

Can Someone please tell me if the altitude record in a photo's GPS details is from the point of take off or above sea level.Thank You.

The answer depends on the platform and firmware. The original scheme used by DJI was very confusing, and explained in this post:

Incorrect EXIF GPS and Elevation

Mavic 2 Pro flight and pictures excellent, but image EXIF data shows altitude was a bit over 115 million meters...which would be impressive if true. Lat/Lon also consistently off by about 3/4 mile. This matters when feeding pics into Pix4D photogrammetry software. Anyone else check their EXIF...

mavicpilots.com

More recently, at least on the Mavic 2, they changed the EXIF data so that the fields marked as GPS altitude do actually display GPS altitude:

Firmware v01.00.0510 EXIF altitude changes

A number of people have noted that the latest firmware has changed the EXIF altitude data, but DJI did not specify exactly what had changed. I guessed that it was what I had been bugging them about – namely that the altitude data fields were mis-labeled, e.g. : GPS Altitude Ref ...

mavicpilots.com