Photosynth and the art of the amazing 360 panorama

Hey, everyone, Neil here. For my second post on the blog, I'm going to talk a little about a Microsoft Research project called Photosynth.

Some of you may have already heard about this as it's been available on iOS for about a year or so (and recently made available on Windows Phone). It's a really neat photo app that lets you take 360 degree panoramas using your phone. It's incredibly easy to use; it actually takes the pictures for you as you move your phone around. Once your panorama is stitched together you can upload to photosynth.net, Facebook, Twitter, and Bing Maps (and embed them on your website once they're uploaded). You can geotag your panoramas to show where they were taken, and show them on Bing Maps. You can also view and comment on other user's panoramas on the website (kinda like Instagram), and there are some absolutely fascinating panoramas out there.

There are quite a few novel applications for this technology. You could embed panoramas of the front and back yards of the house you are selling, or even each room. You could make your vacation photo album even more amazing by showing the entire location, instead of a couple of snapshots. My brother is thinking of using this to document the rivers and streams he is studying. There are pretty much endless possibilities for this technology.

Stitching 360 panoramas isn't confined to the phone. Microsoft Research also created desktop software that will stitch together pictures from any source to create a panorama, called the Image Composite Editor (ICE). The software is incredibly powerful, with the ability to stich pictures in gigapixel resolution. Instead of stitching panoramas with your Lumia's 8MP resolution, you could stitch together 200 photos you took with your Canon Mark III. How cool would that look.

Check out a sample panorama that I made using ICE from my trip to Denali National Park a few years ago. I took these pictures with the intention of making them a panorama later on, but never got around to it until I found out about ICE.

Here is a sample Photosynth taken with my Lumia the other night. There was some really harsh side lighting from the sun, and I had a hard time lining up the shots to get the siding to stitch together correctly. If I get a chance, I'll update this post with a better panorama.

And here is one of my favorite photosynths so far (taken by user ssesynth). Pretty amazing.

The worst place to store photos is....

Without a doubt, the worst way to store your photos online is Facebook!  That is right, the one place that makes it easiest for you to share them with your friends is also the worst place to keep them.  No, I am not drunk or off my rocker.  It is true, if you value your photos as most people do, only keep a copy of them on Facebook.  


If you are anything like me, you too get wildly annoyed by having to take the same picture 15 times with each person's different camera.  In today's world of digital photography, how could that be?  Sure I can see why this was necessary when it cost $$$ to reproduce copies and took a very concerted effort to meetup or mail them as a means of sharing.  


Here is where Facebook starts to fill the gap.  The tagging feature allows people to "get a copy" of the photo.  This is great as it does allow you a chance to see and "get" the photos you want from other people's cameras.  It has infinite storage, it is free, and as long as you are friends with or want to be friends with all the people at the event, you stand a better than good opportunity to at least see the pictures in your newsfeed or be tagged in them.  

What most people don't know and Facebook doesn't really want them to know, it is very difficult to get your pictures out of Facebook.  What if you want to throw them on a USB drive and run down to Walgreens to get them printed for a collage or other project.  Nope, not going to be easy with Facebook.  What if you had a social identity disaster and needed to change accounts...next to impossible to extract all of your photos from Facebook to your computer.  They will do it, but takes weeks and by most accounts is always incomplete and doesn't include any pictures that you didn't own but were tagged in.  This is all bad news


So, what is the answer?  Where is the BEST place to store your photos online?  The good news is there are plenty of places that make good sense on what to do with your photos.  First lets look at the features that most users might find nice to have when considering working with their pics.  

• Universal Access (Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Phone)
• Control of photos (ability to add/delete/move with ease)
• Photo processing (instagram type features, crop, resize, etc)
• Printing (either locally or through an online service)
• Sharing (Facebook, Twitter, individuals or Groups)

I am sure there are others, but this encompasses many of the highly desired photo features.  There are a number of ways that satisfy a number of these requirements.  It is hard to go wrong with the standard online drive services like www.skydrive.com, drive.google.com, or www.dropbox.com.  They allow you complete control over your files as well as some sharing capabilities.  They aren't designed specifically for photos, though Skydrive without a doubt has the most sophisticated photo specific abilities.   

To look at photo specific services, you would want to check out Google's picasaweb.google.com,Yahoo's www.flickr.com, www.photobucket.com, www.shutterfly.com.  These sites offer the most photo specific tools.  Google's Picasa has a software that you can download to your computer to help you with sharing/organizing/modifying your pictures.  It is a great little manager, but definitely not entirely necessary.  Flickr is a favorite with most high end photographers due to their ability to control the rights of their photos and even be some a marketplace for their work.

Here at Inverted Networks, not surprisingly we utilize Google Picasa.  It has some very interesting features that allow for collaborating online photo albums.  We can all contribute to specific albums simply by email the photos to a unique contact in our phone.  The RSS feature allows us to connect and share with LCD Picture frames to those that aren't all that technologically savvy.  Through the data liberation service at Google, we can extract our data at our wish.  

There are plenty of good ways to protect the safety of your photos, allow you to share them with anyone with an email address (without having to let them into your Facebook world) as well as several other photo-centric features.  If you have any other services we missed here, please feel free to let us know.