Free panorama software with free image hosting: Photosynth.net

I love to hike, and always carry a camera to record what the day brings. But a a single frame often doesn’t do justice to the view from a Montana mountainside. The magic is in the experience of taking in the entire vista, focusing, one by one, on myriad different details.

So I often shoot panoramas – comprised of somewhere between three and forty frames. Once home, I download the images and using either Photoshop’s Photomerge or Hugin, stitch them together. But it’s a MONSTER – often 30 MB or larger. I can reduce it to an e-mailable size,  but then you can’t see those great details! So that means the image is held captive on my drive.

Watching a TED video last weekend, I bumped into a solution that frees my land-locked panoramas.

Photosynth.net lets you share your panoramic experience with the entire web. And it’s easy! The first time you build a Photosynth, you download and install the builder program. Then for each Photosynth you want to build, you simply load your JPEG’s into their simple interface(drag and drop from explorer works great). Then fill in a couple text fields, choose the rights you are granting, press “START,” and go have lunch. The Photosynth builder analyzes your set of images locally. When its done building a map of connecting points, it pushes the completed project up to the Photosynth website automatically. And you can have up to 20 GB (yes, Gigabytes) of data there free. You can even use your images for (modest) commercial purposes without charge.

So now your friends can click through your panorama in their browser. PhotoSynth shows them images several at a time, and lets them easily look around. Since Photosynth uploads your images at full resolution, they can easily zoom in while viewing them, and ponder those great details you captured.  (A browser plugin is required, and is available for Firefox or Internet Explorer.)

As the image’s author, you have several nice customization options. You can set up Highlights,  as well as select where people start viewing your masterpiece. If you want to spend a few more minutes, you can register your image on Bing maps so people can see where you took it from and which direction you were looking.

Caveats: My understanding is the PhotoSynth builder is not yet available for Mac users, and it does take a bit of processing power (or extra time) to combine a large number of images. For example, I work on an HP desktop with quad core processors and 8 GB of ram. It took about 30 minutes to process and upload 65 full-frame 8 megapixel images. (The last half of that time was spent uploading the images to the PhotoSynth.net site.)

Experimental fun: I tried placing two panoramas shot from different locations but of the the same general area in the same photosynth. I wanted to see if Photosynth could resolve and combine them.  It didn’t. But it still started up, and I found that I could make BOTH accessible by setting separate Highlights that point into each one.

The trick is to first switch to the “image” view. Then you can select an image in the second set, and make it a Highlight image in the series. Once you have a Highlight established in each series, your viewer can switch back and forth simply by selecting the appropriate starting Highlight. You can see an example HERE. You enter this image series viewing “Pano 1.” On the right side of the main image window, click on the Highlight titled Pano 2. (The highlights are a strip of thumbnails.) You now switch to the second Panorama view.

The great thing about Photosynth.net is that the whole process doesn’t take much real time, and the results are both very good AND easily shared: just send a link to your photosynth! (Being FREE doesn’t hurt either!)

If you decide to post a photosynth, please drop back here and leave a comment with a link so others reading this can go have a look!

Happy shooting!

Art

Update: I just added another Photosynth of the Missoula Valley looking down from the top of Snowbowl: HERE

PLEASE NOTE: All Photos on this site are Copyrighted and may not be used without written permission.