Low-altitude aerial imagery collected from a UAS at Nauset Light Beach, Eastham, MA on September 14 and 20, 2023, pre and post Hurricane Lee

These JPEG images were collected with a camera (Ricoh GR11) attached to a 3DR Solo drone so that the camera triggered every 2 seconds and the camera faced downward, one flight on September 20 was adjusted so that the camera was at an angle. The drone was programmed to fly at 7 m/s along transects 25 meters apart with 70% overlap and sidelap. The oblique flight on September 20 was flown manually. Flights were done by remote pilots J. Over and J. Cramer.

The positions of each image were estimated from the Agisoft Metashape SfM results, see the larger work citation digital surface model metadata for more information. The positions are provided in the 2023022FA_NLB_HxLee_imagelocations.csv in multiple coordinate systems, see below, but only the latitude, longitude, and altitude (NAVD88) were embedded in the image header using exiftools.

The images acquired with the camera were geotagged and processed to add additional information required by the USGS to the EXIF headers using ExifTools (https://exiftool.org/, version: 12.06), and the files were renamed to a unique identifier using Namexif (http://www.digicamsoft.com/softnamexif.html, version 2.1) to avoid any possibility of duplicate names. These steps are described here. For more information on the EXIF tags here and automatically populated by the camera see https://exiftool.org/TagNames/EXIF.html
1. Using the positions from the previous step, ExifTools was used to tag each photo with the following tags: Credit, Copyright, Contact, UsageTerms, ImageDescription, Artist, XMP:ExternalMetadataLink, XMP:UsageTerms, XMP:AttributionURL, XMP:PreservedFilename, GPSTimeStamp, GPSDateStamp, GPSAltitudeRef, GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLongitudeRef, GPSAreaInfo, GPSMapDatum, GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude, and GPSAltitude stored in a CSV file with the command:' exiftool -csv="C:\directory\name\Geotags_EXIF.csv" C:\directory\name\of\photos *.JPG
The first row of the CSV are the tag names; the first column is SourceName (unique image names).
To read out the photo information to a CSV when in the directory with the photos the command is: exiftool -csv *.JPG > allheaders_out.csv
2. All the JPEG images were renamed with Namexif (https://us.digicamsoft.com/softnamexif.html v 2.2 accessed April 2020) to ensure unique filenames and compliance with the USGS Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program's best practices for image naming convention. Images were renamed with the field survey ID prefix; flight number, and ID that distinguishes USGS cameras by make/camera number, the image acquisition date, coordinated universal time (UTC) in ISO8601 format, and a suffix with the original image name. For example, image name '2023022FA_f##r02_20230914T134646Z_####.jpg', 2023022FA is the field activity ID, f## is the flight number, r02 is the camera make and ID, and 20230914 is the UTC date in the format YYYYMMDD. A 'T' is used to separate UTC date from UTC time in format HHMMSS followed by a Z, and ####.jpg is the original raw photo name appended to the end of the new filename.