Hi !
We’re trying to learn to use Pix4D in Senegal. Power supply is not very reliable here (several cuts a day) and the network is either slow, expensive, or both.
This makes using Pix4D local processing quite difficult, because when the computer shuts down, the whole step is lost.
I thought Pix4D cloud processing would be the solution to avoid that. But uploading over 3 gigs takes quite some time here, and the UI doesn’t allow to resume interrupted uploads. So the power cut problems still applies.
Last time we’ve been lucky and have been able to upload our dataset at once. But we forgot to check the first step (which had succeeded locally), so the whole upload was to be started over, and it failed already twice.
In the mean time, we’ve successfully and easily uploaded the whole image set on dropbox, which smoothly resumes upload when possible.
Would it be possible to allow to resume interrupted uploads, or, better, allow to provide data from dropbox ? That would really help us out here !
Thanks !
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
Thanks for your feedback. The resume option is on the roadmap for the Cloud development. The link with Dropbox would be a good alternative as well, but is not on the roadmap right now.
When the upload of the dataset is successful but you forgot to check the processing step, you can contact us through the request form (https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/hc/en-us/requests/new?) and our Cloud team should be able to change the setting manually for your project, so that you don’t have to reupload it again.
Thanks for the answer.
Ok I’ll keep that in mind next time we make this type of mistake 
Also, the same problem with bandwidth arises when it comes to downloading the results. I was hoping it would be possible to share the download link, so that I could download the results directly on the VPS that then serves our map tiles. But it’s not that easy, because the download links are secured (which is of course a good thing). So this requires to login on the computer that downloads the tiles, but such a login isn’t easily achieved on a headless server. I even tried using a command line browser (lynx), but due to the javascript nature of the website, it’s not possible.
So I had to download the several gigs of results just to reupload them to our VPS, quite a challenge here !
Again, a more interoperable way to download the results would be great (get a shareable link to download the results, perhaps with expiration date or max download count to avoid unlimited resharing, and maybe also a save to dropbox/drive option as well).
I think these small attentions to slow infrastructure are really worth it if you want to get market shares in the developing world. It actually almost completely kills the impressive ease of use of Pix4D.
Thanks !
Thanks for sharing this information. We really appreciate the feedback. We have transferred it to our Cloud Product Manager.
Update from the first answer: The Cloud team seems to have in mind to implement the upload from Dropbox and the download of the results to Dropbox, same for Google Drive, so we are on the path to improve the compatibility with third party services.