Surprisingly, until last week, Agisoft Metashape, one of the leading Structure-from-Motion (SfM) software tools, did not natively support exporting to COLMAP on their Standard version.

Previously, users needed the Pro version of Metashape to easily send projects to COLMAP, at a hefty $3.5K licensing cost. However, in the recent pre-release of Metashape Standard 2.1.3, this feature has been made available in the Standard version, which, while still priced at $179, is a more accessible option.

With this update, exporting camera poses to COLMAP is now possible with just a few clicks. Simply navigate to File > Export > Export Cameras and select the colmap.txt format. Then, check binary encoding, and the software will export undistorted images and the sparse/0 folder with the .bin files.

Here you can watch it rip through 200 images in a little less than two minutes. It should also be noted that this is running on Mac, without CUDA acceleration.

The exported camera poses can be seamlessly integrated into your local training platform of choice, such as Nerfstudio or Postshot.

This year has seen a surge in options for the critical first step of creating radiance fields, with updates from COLMAP, RealityCapture, GLOMAP, and now Metashape’s expanded capabilities, making the process more accessible to users.

If you're interested in trying the pre-release of Metashape Standard 2.1.3, download it for your platform via the links below:

• Windows 64-bit

• macOS

• Linux 64-bit