1. Open Your Data

Start with a project

The main menu is your project library. Choose My Local Projects for projects imported on this device, Demo Projects to explore examples, or Shared With Me for projects shared by other people. My Shared projects lists shares you created. Select a project and use Open Project to enter the workbench.

A project is the practical unit of work. It can contain several related scans or datasets, organized as layers, along with the views and annotations you create while inspecting them. You do not need to put every survey in a different project, but combining unrelated datasets simply because they cover a similar area is rarely helpful.

Demo projects are not just a software tour. They are a good way to discover which camera and display mode best answers a particular kind of question, without the distraction of importing and preparing a large survey first.

Import files or a folder

1. Choose Select Files... on the main menu.
2. Select your data. On desktop you can choose several files together, or use Select Folder... to search a folder and its subfolders.
3. If a folder contains several supported format families, choose which types to import.
4. Review the import summary, enter a project name, and confirm creation.
5. Wait for processing to finish. The new project opens in the workbench in a top-down Map view.

The desktop file picker supports:

The browser picker currently offers LAS, LAZ, TIF, and TIFF, without folder selection. On iPad, use the system document picker; which files and folders are accessible follows that platform's picker.

Practical example: A corridor survey may arrive as hundreds of LAZ tiles arranged in subfolders. On desktop, folder import lets you pick the survey directory rather than opening each tile individually. After importing, you can navigate the corridor as a site instead of treating every tile as a separate inspection job.

Import needs working disk space in addition to the source files. For files in cloud-synced storage, make sure they are downloaded locally first. Large imports take time, and the app may warn about disk space, browser size limits, unsupported headers, or unusual coordinates. The amount of data you can work with also depends on the device and platform.

Coordinates matter more than they appear to

Keep related files in a compatible coordinate system. Do not assume that importing unrelated surveys will automatically align them. Resolve coordinate warnings before relying on measurements or comparing scans.

This is particularly important when combining data from different contractors, survey dates, or instruments. Two scans can each look perfectly reasonable in isolation and still be in different reference frames. PurpleGeo can show what is in the files, but visually plausible alignment is not proof that their coordinates are consistent.

For a quick visual review, imperfect metadata may be an inconvenience. For a millimetre-sensitive fit check or repeat-survey comparison, it can invalidate the result. Check the source before interpreting the numbers.

Add data or open a share

Inside a project, use Add Files... to import more data into that project rather than creating a separate one. You can edit the project name in the workbench's project-name field.

Adding data is useful when you have, for example, an airborne LiDAR survey covering the whole site and a terrestrial scan of one specific structure. They offer different kinds of detail, and seeing them together can provide context, provided the coordinates are compatible.

To open someone else's work, follow their PurpleGeo link, or use Open Shared Project, paste the link, and open it. Shared data requires a network connection when it is not already cached. Detail may arrive progressively as you explore.

The immediate preview helps you orient yourself, but allow the higher-resolution data to arrive before judging fine features or relying on precise picks.