Degutis Insights

Note - you will need to install the Photosynth browser plug-in to see the images below. At this time you have to install the client and browser plug-in at the same time, which you can do by click on the below.

While I still can’t get Microsoft’s Photosynth to display the web images on my Windows XP or Vista running in VMWare Fusion v1 (Fusion v2 Beta is required), I was able to get some interesting results with a series of pictures I took of our house and property.

The steps to creating a synth are very simple:

1. 1. Take pictures, preferably enough “connecting photos”
2. 2. Feed the photos to the Photosynth program and it does the rest

My first attempt at creating the necessary photos for a good synth was a simple 360 degree view from a center-ish point in the backyard: camera on a tripod, snapping pictures and slightly rotating the camera for the next shot.  Of the 42 photos I feed it, 76% of them were synthy and the following is the result.

The Photosynth Photography Guide (1Mbyte PDF) says a minimum of 9 photos are needed to create a good synth around a corner.  So I took 103 shots of the southeast corner and east side of our house.  While taking the pictures I ran into an obstacle, our inflatable pool.  I only took a few shots around it concerned that the varying distance will cause a problem or the photos to be dropped from the synth.  I was pleasantly surprised that it was able to incorporate all of them, providing a 3D-ish scrolling effect.  I wish I would have taken more photos going around the pool.

After the synths are uploaded to the Photosynth web site, you can rename them, add or change the description, and delete them.  There is no way to add to, or update an existing photosynth by adding photos.  Also, it doesn’t allow for manual geocoding and I’m not sure how it uses photos with the geodata embedded.  It would be cool if geocoding was an option that could be enabled or disabled for privacy. Maybe these changes will be coming in a future update.

Photosynth is fun.  Taking the pictures isn’t a lot of work, but more effort is required to get a good synth. Luckily the software does all of the complicated work.

Posted by Al Degutis