# Swathwise — Size a drone LiDAR job > Size a drone LiDAR job (iPhone/iPad app by River James.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/swathwise/id6814688026 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [River James](https://appshunter.io/developer/6814688028) - Category: Productivity, Utilities - Price: Free - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 15.0 · 6 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-09-24 - Data updated: 2026-10-31 ## What is Swathwise? Swathwise sizes a drone LiDAR or photogrammetry job from a map. Draw the flight area, or bring in a boundary file, pick the aircraft and the sensor, choose the kind of job, and Swathwise works out the area, the flight lines, the flight time and how many battery sets the day will take. Its settings for each kind of job come from published standards (USGS Lidar Base Specification, ASPRS, FEMA and others), and it shows which one it is following. What it does: - Area, flight time and battery sets for a drawn boundary - Job presets built on published standards, with the citation - Corridor routes for fiber, roads and pipelines - Draft flight routes as KMZ files for the controller, with terrain from USGS 3DEP (United States) - A printable flight plan and a field sheet - Maps from USGS, USDA NAIP and the Census Bureau; no account, no key Swathwise gives planning estimates and draft routes. It does not fly the aircraft, check the airspace, or know what stands on the ground. Check every route on the controller before it is flown. Terms of use: https://swathwise.org/terms/ ## Is Swathwise safe? Not enough ratings yet to assess Swathwise. ## Is Swathwise legit? Swathwise appears legitimate, with a few gaps. The AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Swathwise is 65 out of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data. ## Version history (last 4 releases) ### 1.9.4 — 2026-10-21 • Ground control: a new tab beside Flights plans control points and checkpoints for the areas on the map, for a drone job or a Trimble MX60 drive. It places them by the published rules, exports them for Trimble Access (CSV), KML or GeoJSON, and checks the survey file you bring back, down to the accuracy the checkpoints prove. • The printed flight plan is drawn over aerial photos (USDA NAIP, United States only) and looks like the program. A corridor in legs gets a map for each leg. The field sheet has the same new look. • Corridor routes now import into DJI FlightHub 2. Route files are named with letters and digits only, because FlightHub refuses anything else. • The corridor legs line now says what set the leg length (sight distance, GNSS base reach, base spacing or the battery) and links to that setting. • M400 + L3: the PPK base can be up to 15 km away (DJI's L3 figure), and a battery set is planned at 35 minutes until measured. ### 1.9.2 — 2026-09-28 • GNSS base spacing is now yours to set. Under Flight settings, "GNSS base every (mi)" places a base every that many miles along a corridor. Leave it empty and Swathwise uses the most your job allows. • Swathwise now tells you how far the aircraft can get from the GNSS base before vertical accuracy slips past your job's target, at the height you are flying. It also gives the height at which the full 10 km holds. Example: an L2 on design-grade fiber (4.6 cm) holds about 1.3 km at 105 m and 8.4 km at 80 m. • A corridor flown in one run now shows its GNSS base too (G1, at the middle of the route). ### 1.8.1 — 2026-09-25 • Type an address and the search suggests it as you go, like a map app. A US street address the map data does not know is still found, house number and all. • Pick parcels: tap it, tap lots on the map, and each becomes a flight area with the lot's own boundary. A second tap takes it off. Merge areas joins the lots that touch into one boundary. Lots come from the county and state parcel services (Jackson, Josephine and Klamath counties in Oregon, San Diego County and all of California so far). • Parcel lines, in the map's layer menu: property boundaries drawn over the map from neighbourhood scale in. • Parcel boundaries (KML or GeoJSON) in Export: every lot the flight covers, with the assessor's fields, for Google Earth, DJI Terra or a GIS. • The four steps fold. The place search stays above them, and a folded step says what is set on its right. • Flight lines: the legs flown to reach the next line are dashed; the scan lines are solid. High-contrast flight lines, in the map's layer menu, makes them bold over a dark halo. • With a camera selected the headline shows the photo count beside square miles, flight time and battery sets, and the settings say how often the shutter fires. • A small ↺ beside any setting that differs from the standard puts that one setting back. • While you are picking parcels, drawing, or placing the launch point, the other tools step back until you are done. • LiDAR routes for the Matrice 300 and 350 now record on the scan lines only, pausing through each turn, as airborne LiDAR is flown. ### 1.7.2 — 2026-09-24 No release notes. ## More apps by River James - [Word Voyage: Word Search Game](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/word-voyage-word-search-game/id6818835588) - [Boat Wiring Diagram](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/boat-wiring-diagram/id6823996292) All apps by River James: https://appshunter.io/developer/6814688028 --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-10-31.*