Announcements

DroneDB v2.0 – The biggest update since launch

19 March 2026
7 min read

We are excited to announce DroneDB Hub 2.0: the biggest update since we launched the platform. This release includes Registry v2.0.5 and DroneDB v1.4.4, bringing a completely redesigned frontend, powerful new tools, granular permissions, and dozens of improvements under the hood.

Here’s a summary of everything that’s new since our January update (Registry v1.6.2 / DroneDB v1.3.4).

A Completely Redesigned Interface

The Hub frontend has been rebuilt from the ground up: migrated from the legacy codebase to Vue 3 with PrimeVue. Over 110 commits went into this rewrite, touching every part of the user interface. The result is a modern, consistent, and significantly faster experience:

  • New design system: streamlined color palette, refreshed SVG branding, improved typography, and consistent component styling across every page.
  • PrimeVue DataTable: the file explorer now uses a professional data grid with sortable columns, striped rows, and proper empty-state handling.
  • Skeleton loading states: content areas show subtle placeholder animations while data loads, eliminating blank-screen moments.
  • Toast notifications: replaced the old flash messages with non-intrusive toast popups.
  • Improved responsive design: optimized layouts for mobile and tablet, with smaller logos and adaptive pagination.
  • Upload speed & ETA: the file upload dialog now shows real-time upload speed and estimated time remaining.
  • Unified file detail panel: the properties panel now uses a single, clean table layout with consistent field ordering.
  • Draggable dialogs: dialog headers can now be dragged to reposition them on screen.

Organizations & Granular Permissions

Managing teams just got a lot more powerful. We’ve introduced four permission levels for organization members: Read Only, Read/Write, Read/Write/Delete, and Admin: giving you fine-grained control over who can do what.

  • Organization member management: add, update roles, and remove members directly from the UI with search and confirmation flows.
  • Permission enforcement everywhere: context menus, toolbar buttons, drag-and-drop, measurements, and dataset creation all respect the user’s permission level. Read-only users no longer see actions they can’t perform.
  • Redesigned organizations page: search bar, “Show all” toggle, client-side pagination with persistent preferences, and improved card layout.
  • Configurable default organizations: new users can optionally skip the automatic personal organization creation.

Advanced Map Tools

The map experience has seen massive improvements with new interaction tools and customization options:

Spatial Selection

  • Rectangle and polygon selection: draw shapes on the map to select multiple features at once. Selection is additive: successive draws add to the current selection. Right-click cancels the drawing without deactivating the tool.
  • Select All / Deselect All buttons and a dedicated clear-selection button.

Map Settings Dialog

  • Custom basemaps: add your own XYZ tile URLs or WMS endpoints, with automatic layer detection and tile-load validation via GetCapabilities.
  • Measurement unit switcher: toggle between metric and imperial units.
  • Flight path visibility: show or hide drone flight paths with a single toggle.
  • WMS tile size selector: choose between 256×256 and 512×512 tile sizes for WMS basemap sources.
  • WMS TIME dimension: automatic detection and passthrough of the WMS TIME dimension from GetCapabilities, with fallback to the last available time extent.
  • All preferences are persisted in your browser’s local storage.

Flight Data Visualization

  • Direction arrows and speed indicators: see camera orientation and flight speed directly on the map for each geotagged image.
  • Raster layer opacity slider: adjust orthophoto transparency on the fly.

Measurement List & Management

  • Measurement list dialog: a new panel to view, inspect, and delete individual measurements from the map, accessible via a toolbar button.
  • Point annotations: place color-coded point markers with descriptions on the map.
  • Measurements panel moved from left to right side for better ergonomics.

Image Viewer & Lightbox

Browsing images is now a seamless experience with the new fullscreen lightbox viewer:

  • Fullscreen image browsing: click any image or geoimage to open it in a high-quality lightbox with navigation between files.
  • Coordinates and altitude overlay: geolocation data is displayed directly on the image.
  • Image popup on map click: click a geoimage marker on the map to see a thumbnail, coordinates, and copy-to-clipboard action.
  • PDF viewer: view PDF files directly in the browser without downloading.

Dataset Thumbnails & Taglines

Datasets are now easier to identify at a glance:

  • “Set as Cover” context menu: right-click any image to set it as the dataset thumbnail.
  • Thumbnail management in Settings: upload, preview, and remove dataset cover images with cache-busting.
  • Tagline field: add a short description (up to 256 characters) to each dataset, visible in listings.

Improved 3D & Point Cloud Viewers

  • Nexus viewer enhancements: lighting controls are now available for all 3D models (not just untextured ones), with a new hemisphere light for better illumination and a dedicated settings window. Preferences persist across sessions.
  • Improved textureless model handling: better defaults and lighting for models without textures.
  • Potree improvements: unit selector (metric/imperial), adaptive Splat Quality (HQ on desktop, Standard on mobile), and fixed annotation tooltips.

Security & Administration

  • Configurable password policy: enforce minimum length, digits, uppercase, lowercase, and special characters on user creation and password changes. Live validation indicators in the frontend.
  • Per-user download limits: configurable concurrent download thresholds with preflight checks and admin bypass.
  • Cross-origin embedding: X-Frame-Options relaxed to SAMEORIGIN, with full cross-origin support for embed routes (?embed=1).
  • Path traversal protection: multi-layered validation on file uploads.
  • Registration link control: self-hosted instances can hide the registration link on the login page.

STAC Compliance Improvements

DroneDB’s STAC support has been significantly enhanced:

  • Projection extension: proj:transform, proj:wkt2, proj:shape, and proj:epsg fields for georeferenced items.
  • Temporal extent: STAC Collections and Items now include datetime and temporal intervals.
  • Asset MIME types and roles: assets now include proper type detection and roles: ["data"] for all supported formats.
  • Fixed bbox format: corrected the nested array issue for proper downstream client compatibility.
  • URL-encoded asset hrefs: asset references now use query-parameter format with proper URL encoding.

DroneDB Core Engine Upgrades

The underlying DroneDB library (v1.4.4) received substantial improvements:

  • Performance boost: migrated SHA256 hashing to OpenSSL, added database indexes, parallel build folder cleanup, batch metadata operations, and fingerprint caching to eliminate duplicate file reads.
  • Flight metadata extraction: flight speed, GPS accuracy, GPS direction, and camera orientation are now extracted from DJI XMP, EXIF, and RTK tags.
  • Improved capture time accuracy: priority-based timestamp cascade (GPS time → OffsetTime → geo-timezone → UTC fallback).
  • Thumbnail fixes: fixed generation failure for single-band GeoTIFFs (DEM/DSM) and grayscale-plus-alpha images.
  • PLY point cloud fixes: fixed EPT generation from PLY files and Nexus-related crash fixes for edge-case meshes.
  • Automatic type re-detection on rename: when a file extension changes, the entry type is now automatically updated.
  • Image dimension fix: width and height are now extracted from the file structure even when no EXIF/XMP metadata is present (e.g., plain PNG files), with a validity guard against zero-dimension entries.

Infrastructure & Reliability

  • Instant dataset deletion: deleting a dataset is now instantaneous; filesystem and job cleanup happen in the background.
  • Batch delete API: delete multiple files from a dataset in a single API call.
  • Background job cleanup: automatic purging of old terminal job records with configurable retention.
  • Cache management: pattern-based cache invalidation for tiles, thumbnails, and build-pending states.
  • Dataset rescan: “Rescan Dataset” option in settings to re-index and update metadata.
  • Unified feature flags: new /sys/features endpoint replaces legacy per-feature endpoints.
  • Node.js 22: upgraded Docker and build environment.

Full Version History

This release spans 11 Registry versions and 6 DroneDB versions. Here’s the complete list:

Hub: 114 commits including the full Vue 3 + PrimeVue migration (GitHub)

Get Started

Cloud: The update is already live on hub.dronedb.app: just log in and enjoy the new experience.

Self-hosted: Download the latest release from GitHub or pull the updated Docker image. See the documentation for upgrade instructions.

CLI: Grab DroneDB v1.4.4 from GitHub Releases.

Your feedback drives our development. Join the community discussion or open an issue to share your thoughts.

Happy flying! ✈️

The DroneDB Team