You finished processing a drone survey, exported a beautiful orthomosaic, and now you need to actually look at it — or show it to a client who has never heard of QGIS. You double-click the file and your photo viewer either refuses to open it or chokes on a 3 GB TIFF. This is the single most common friction point I hear from drone operators and surveyors: the deliverable is excellent, but getting it onto a screen without specialist software is harder than it should be.
The good news is that viewing an orthomosaic in a browser is now a solved problem. Here are the options, from “I just need to see it right now” to “my client needs to explore it on their phone.”
Just want to look at one now? Open a GeoTIFF or orthomosaic on a map in your browser — free, no signup, and the file stays on your computer.
Why an orthomosaic won’t open in a normal image viewer
An orthomosaic is almost always a GeoTIFF: a standard TIFF image with embedded geospatial metadata — the coordinate reference system (CRS), the geographic bounding box, and the pixel resolution. That metadata is the whole point. It’s what lets the image sit at its true location on a map so measurements and overlays line up with reality.
Two things break ordinary image viewers:
- Size. Survey-grade orthomosaics are frequently 1–10 GB. Most desktop photo apps load the entire image into memory before showing a pixel, so they stall or crash.
- Georeferencing. Even when a viewer opens the file, it treats it as a flat picture and discards the CRS. You lose the one thing that makes an orthomosaic useful — its position on Earth.
A geospatial viewer solves both: it reads the CRS and bounding box, places the image on a base map, and (for the right file format) streams only the pixels currently on screen.
Option 1 — A free browser-based GeoTIFF viewer
The fastest path is a web tool that renders the GeoTIFF locally. Drag the file in, and it parses the geospatial metadata and draws the raster on an interactive map with an OpenStreetMap base layer. No upload, no account, no GIS licence.
This is ideal for a quick desktop check — confirming coverage, spotting gaps or cloud, eyeballing a registration before you deliver. Swyvl’s free GeoTIFF viewer runs entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine. It reads the projection from the file and reprojects to WGS 84 for display, handling common UTM zones, national grids, and state-plane systems automatically.
The limitation is inherent to a local tool: it can show the file to you, on this computer. It can’t hand a live, interactive view to a client across the country.
Option 2 — Convert to a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF for large files
If your orthomosaic is large, the format matters more than the viewer. A Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) is the same GeoTIFF, internally reorganised into tiles with pre-built overview levels. A COG-aware viewer requests only the tiles for the current viewport via HTTP range requests, so a multi-gigabyte file behaves like a web map: an instant low-resolution overview, with detail streaming in as you zoom.
Converting is one GDAL command:
gdal_translate input.tif orthomosaic_cog.tif -of COG -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE
See how to convert a GeoTIFF to COG for the full workflow, including projection and validation. Once it’s a COG, browser viewing of even very large rasters is smooth.
Option 3 — Host it and share an interactive link with clients
For delivery, a local tool isn’t enough — your client needs to open the orthomosaic themselves, on whatever device they have, without installing anything. That means hosting the raster and serving it as map tiles behind a link.
This is exactly what Swyvl does. Upload the GeoTIFF and the platform converts it to a COG, then serves it as on-the-fly web-mercator map tiles rendered straight from the COG — no pre-generated tile pyramid to store. Your client opens a branded share link, sees the orthomosaic on a fast, zoomable map, and can pan around at full resolution with the responsiveness they expect from Google Maps. You can password-protect the link and see a full audit trail of who viewed and downloaded what. For the client experience, see the client portal.
Which option should you use?
| You want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Glance at a file on your own machine right now | Free browser GeoTIFF viewer |
| Make a large orthomosaic viewable at all | Convert to COG, then view |
| Let a client explore it online, no software | Host it and share a link |
A note on other raster deliverables
The same logic applies to the rest of a typical drone-survey output. Digital terrain and surface models (DTM/DSM/DEM) are single-band GeoTIFFs and view the same way — they render with a greyscale or colour ramp instead of true colour. If you’re not sure what formats your pipeline produces, see what file formats drone surveys produce.
For an orthomosaic specifically, the workflow is now genuinely simple: if it’s small, drop it into a browser viewer; if it’s large, make it a COG first; and if a client needs it, host it and send a link. None of those steps require GIS software at the other end — which is the whole point of delivering spatial data people can actually open.