I’m trying out Regard3d, an open-source photogrammetry tool. A couple of items, memo-to-self style of thing:

• • its database does not have cellphone cameras in it. Had to google around to find the details on my particular phone
  • its database is this: https://github.com/openMVG/CameraSensorSizeDatabase 
  • just had to find where it was on my machine, and then make an entry for my phone. I’m still not sure whether I got the correct ‘width’ dimension – running with this. 
  • nb don’t do this with excel – excel does weird things to csv files, including hidden characters and so on which will cause Regard to not recognize your new database entry. Use Sublime Text or another text editor to make any changes. You can double click on an image in the imageset list inside Regard and add the relevant info one pic at a time, but this didn’t work for me.
  • I took the images with Scann3d, which made a great model out of them. But its pricing model doesn’t let me get the model out. So, found the folder on the phone with the images, uploaded to google drive, then downloaded. (Another nice thing about Scann3d is when you’re taking pictures, it has an on-screen red-dot/green-dot thingy that lets you know when you’re getting good overlap.)
  • Once I had the images on my machine, I needed to add exif metadata re focal length.  Downloaded, installed, exiftool. Command:  exiftool -FocalLength="3.97" *.jpg
  • In Regard3d, loaded the picture set in.
  • The next stages were a bit finicky (tutorial) – just clicking the obvious button would give an error, but if I had one of the image files selected in the dialogue box, all would work.
  • here’s a shot of the process in…erm… process…

• Console would shout ‘error! error!’ from time to time, yet all continued to work…

I’m pretty sure I saw an ‘export to meshlab’ button go by at some point… but at any rate, at the end of the process I have a model in .ply and .obj!  (ah, found it: it’s one of the options when you’re ready to create the surface). All in all, a nice piece of software.