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Transfer Images from Drone

Sync captured images from the Raspberry Pi 4 on the drone to your ground station workstation. The transfer uses rsync so it is resume-capable -- if the connection drops, re-run the command to pick up where it left off.

Prerequisites

  • Raspberry Pi 4 powered on and connected to the same WiFi network as your workstation
  • SSH key configured for passwordless access to the Pi (ssh-copy-id pi@bennu.local)

Usage

./ground/transfer/sync_images.sh

Connects to pi@bennu.local and saves images to a timestamped folder in the current directory (e.g., ./captures_20260308_143022/).

Custom Host

./ground/transfer/sync_images.sh pi@192.168.1.50

Custom Host and Output Directory

./ground/transfer/sync_images.sh pi@192.168.1.50 ~/drone_images/flight_003

What Happens

  1. The script connects to the Pi via SSH and counts images in /home/pi/captures
  2. If images are found, rsync transfers all .jpg files with progress display
  3. A summary prints the local output path and total image count
=== Syncing images from pi@bennu.local ===
Checking images on drone...
Found 247 images
...
=== Transfer Complete ===
Images saved to: ./captures_20260308_143022
Image count: 247

Next Step

Process the transferred images with OpenDroneMap:

./ground/odm/process.sh ./captures_20260308_143022

See Start WebODM and Process Images for the full processing workflow.