If the upload wizard reports Coordinate System Mismatch Detected, your camera positions and your 3D model do not agree about where in the world the project is. Several things cause that. This article covers how to tell which one is yours.
The preview step reports the mismatch and puts the two systems side by side:
3D model: Georeferenced (47.875253°, 16.786896°)
Cameras: Local coordinatesCompare the coordinates it gives for the 3D model against where you actually captured. That one check separates most of the causes below. The wizard also reports how many camera positions fall outside the model, and whether the cameras are local or georeferenced.
| What the wizard shows | Usual cause |
| Model georeferenced somewhere you have never been, cameras local | Your images reached the reconstruction without their location. The most common cause, covered below. |
| Both local | The project was never georeferenced at all. It needs image location, ground control points, or another georeferencing method. |
| Both georeferenced, but far apart | The camera export used a different coordinate system from the model. Re-export the cameras in the system your export guide specifies. |
| Model correct, a few cameras outside it | Not this problem. A handful of outliers is normal and does not block an upload. |
Two further causes, both covered in the export guides: moving the model after aligning leaves the camera positions behind, so realign and rebuild, and leaving automatic tie points in a camera export can stop the georeferencing being read at all.
Cameras record where each image was taken, and your reconstruction software uses that to place the model in the world. Without it the alignment can only produce a local result.
The usual way it goes missing is an editing step. Grading a mixed capture set before reconstruction is ordinary practice: raw files from a drone and a hand-held camera are brought into an image editor, matched for exposure, and exported. Some image editors remove the location on export while keeping everything else.
That is what makes it hard to spot. The exported file still carries the make, model, lens, focal length, exposure, and even the camera serial number. Only the location is gone, so a file missing the one thing that matters looks complete.
Look at one exported image. Open it in any tool that shows file information and look for a location or GPS entry. If your original camera files have one and your exported files do not, the editing step removed it.
You do not need to reshoot or re-edit. The location can be copied back into the exported files from your original camera files. That changes only the file information and leaves the images untouched. Once the images carry their location again, run the alignment and export as normal.
Re-running the alignment on its own does not help. Alignment with no position data produces a slightly refined local result, not a georeferenced one, however many times it runs.
RealityScan reports a model as georeferenced even when it is not
Specific to RealityScan, and the reason this failure is hardest to spot there.
A project with no location data is given a fixed default position, and the tileset is exported with that position applied. The model is therefore reported as properly georeferenced while sitting nowhere near where you captured, and only the cameras give it away by staying local. Anyone checking whether their tileset is georeferenced would conclude it was fine.
The default sits in central Europe, so the same coordinates come up whenever this happens.
There is a quick check on the camera file. RealityScan exports camera positions in the Twinsity ECEF format, where values run to millions of metres on every axis because they are measured from the centre of the Earth. If every camera in the file sits within a few tens of units of zero, the positions are local. This check applies to that format only; the other guides export Block Exchange XML or an OPF folder, which declare their coordinate system instead.
Some camera bodies have no receiver, which is not a fault. A capture made entirely on such a camera needs ground control points or another georeferencing method in your reconstruction software before it can be imported.