Recent innovations in digital close-range photogrammetric systems for industrial applications have made possible a high level of automation within the 3D coordinate measurement process. This paper reviews innovations in automation for off-line vision metrology (VM) systems and discusses their operational impact. Concepts such as coded targets, exterior orientation devices, and robust solutions to the multi-image target point correspondence problem are illustrated through reference to a VM system capable of dimensional measurement accuracies of close to 1:200,000.