SkyStitch - Drone Orthomosaic
The SkyStitch plugin allows for the stitching of raw drone photos into a single georeferenced orthomosaic, directly inside QGIS, providing tools for GPS-based alignment, feature matching and GeoTIFF export.
Developed by Muhammad Kholifatkhur Rohman, the SkyStitch plugin allows for turning a folder of raw drone photos (JPG with GPS EXIF data) into one seamless, georeferenced orthomosaic (GeoTIFF), directly inside QGIS. It reads the GPS location and camera parameters from each photo, automatically matches ground features between overlapping photos using SIFT, aligns and fine-tunes the fit using the real GPS coordinates from the flight, then blends everything into one map and loads it straight onto the QGIS canvas -- no need for WebODM, Pix4D, DroneDeploy, or Metashape. Photos need GPS data. Photos should overlap by at least 60-70% with their neighbors for the best (feature-matched) alignment, but this isn't a hard requirement: any photo that doesn't overlap with the rest is still placed on the canvas at its own GPS coordinate rather than being dropped. Best suited for quick previews, small-to-medium survey sites, and relatively flat terrain; for hilly terrain, very large areas, or survey-grade accuracy, a dedicated tool such as WebODM, Pix4D, DroneDeploy, or Metashape is still recommended. This plugin requires the installation of OpenCV, exifread, Rasterio, PyProj, SciPy, and Pillow into QGIS's own Python (step-by-step instructions are in README.md, included in the plugin folder). Version 2.0 adds an optional OpenDroneMap (3D) mode -- a second tool in the same plugin that drives OpenDroneMap (via Docker) to produce a true orthophoto plus DSM, DTM/DEM, point cloud and textured 3D mesh, and can derive contour, slope and hillshade in QGIS -- for when you need full photogrammetry and elevation rather than a quick 2D mosaic (this mode needs Docker instead of the packages above). For more information please visit https://github.com/muhammadkholifatkhurrohman-spec/SkyStitch-Drone-Orthomosaic .