Agisoft Metashape

Agisoft Metashape
Information
Type	Photogrammetry software
Industry	Photogrammetry, 3D scanning, GIS
Developer	Agisoft LLC
Operating System	Windows, macOS, Linux
License	Proprietary (node-locked, floating and educational licenses)
Release Date	2010 (as PhotoScan); renamed Metashape with version 1.5.0 (31 December 2018)
Website	https://www.agisoft.com/

Agisoft Metashape (called Agisoft PhotoScan until version 1.5) is a stand-alone photogrammetry application developed by Agisoft LLC of Saint Petersburg, Russia. It builds point clouds, textured 3D meshes, elevation models and orthomosaics from overlapping digital photographs. Agisoft says the data it produces is used in GIS work, cultural heritage documentation, visual effects and indirect measurement of objects at various scales. The program is sold in a Standard edition and a Professional edition and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

For VR content, PhotoScan was the program that the author of a 2015 Valve guide to capturing real places for SteamVR had the most experience with, and it was the tool used to create the photogrammetry "Postcards" in Valve's The Lab. As of October 2026, the latest stable release is version 2.3.2 of 25 August 2026, and a 2.4.0 preview was published on 14 September 2026.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every claim against Agisoft's change log, product, comparison, licensing, store and help desk pages, CG Channel, Road to VR, Valve's 2015 SteamVR photogrammetry guide, The Astronauts' 2014 post and the five cited papers. About review dates.

History

Agisoft and PhotoScan

Agisoft LLC was founded in 2006 as a research company focused on computer vision. It lists its address as 104-B Nevsky prospect, Saint Petersburg. Its photogrammetry program was first sold as PhotoScan. In a 2011 paper, the archaeologist Geert Verhoeven wrote that PhotoScan had been available from "the Russian manufacturer AgiSoft LLC" since 2010. Agisoft's published change log begins with version 0.7.0 of December 2010 and says that a change log is not available for versions 0.2.1 to 0.6.1.

The change log records Mac OS X support and a move to a cross-platform interface framework in a February 2011 preview of version 0.8.0. Python scripting and command-line processing without a graphical interface came to the Professional edition in a July 2011 preview of version 0.8.3. A July 2012 preview of version 0.9.0 added a timeline pane and "4D dynamic model reconstruction" of scenes that change over time to the Professional edition. Version 1.0.0 was released on 24 December 2013. Version 1.3.0 (February 2017) switched to CUDA on NVIDIA graphics cards and added GPU acceleration for image matching.

Rename to Metashape

Version 1.5.0, released on 31 December 2018 after previews that began in October 2018, carried the new name Agisoft Metashape. Agisoft's help desk describes Metashape 1.5.0 as the successor of PhotoScan and says the update is free for PhotoScan license holders who stay on the same edition. CG Channel reported in January 2019 that the new name reflected a wider feature set, quoting Agisoft as saying Metashape "inherits all the professional photogrammetric kit features from PhotoScan". It described the release as, in practice, the latest version of PhotoScan.

A November 2018 preview of 1.5.0 added a mode that generates highly detailed models from depth maps. CG Channel cited Agisoft documentation in which a building model from 730 images took 9 hours in Metashape against 19 hours in PhotoScan. The release also added binary glTF and X3D model export. In the Professional edition it added automatic classification of dense point clouds into classes such as ground, buildings, vegetation and roads, which CG Channel described as based on machine learning, plus cloud processing.

Version 2

Metashape 2.0.0 was released on 31 December 2022. Its October 2022 preview added aerial and terrestrial lidar support to the Professional edition, letting laser scans be imported, aligned and combined with photogrammetric depth maps when building models. It also added DEM editing tools. Professional 2.0 introduced a new license activation system whose new activations do not work with Professional 1.x. Later releases added an AI-based masking method (2.2.0 preview, September 2024), WebP and KTX 2.0 texture export (2.3.0, December 2025) and ARM64 installers for Windows and Linux (2.4.0 preview, September 2026).

Release history

Version	Name	Date	Notable changes
0.7.0	PhotoScan	5 December 2010	Earliest version in the published change log
0.8.0 preview	PhotoScan	1 February 2011	Cross-platform GUI framework; Mac OS X support
1.0.0	PhotoScan	24 December 2013	Version 1.0 release
1.3.0	PhotoScan	5 February 2017	GPU-accelerated image matching; CUDA on NVIDIA cards
1.4.0	PhotoScan	1 January 2018	Last major version under the PhotoScan name
1.5.0	Metashape	31 December 2018	Renamed; depth-map-based detailed meshes; glTF and X3D export
1.8.0	Metashape	31 December 2021	Apple Silicon support for macOS installers (added in a September 2021 preview)
2.0.0	Metashape	31 December 2022	Lidar data support and DEM editing (Professional); new license activation
2.2.0	Metashape	30 December 2024	AI-based masking (added in a September 2024 preview)
2.3.0	Metashape	31 December 2025	Clean Point Cloud command; WebP and KTX 2.0 texture export
2.3.2	Metashape	25 August 2026	Latest stable release as of October 2026
2.4.0 preview	Metashape	14 September 2026	Reworked image matching; ARM64 installers for Windows and Linux

Features

Metashape follows a structure-from-motion workflow: it aligns photographs by photogrammetric triangulation, then generates and edits dense point clouds, builds and textures 3D models, and can produce georeferenced digital surface and terrain models and orthomosaics. Agisoft's comparison page lists support for frame, fisheye, spherical and cylindrical cameras, multi-camera systems, video import, multispectral and thermal imagery and lidar data. It also lists coded and non-coded target detection, diffuse, occlusion and normal texture map generation, spherical panorama stitching, 4D modeling for dynamic scenes, flythrough video rendering, built-in Python scripting, a stand-alone Python module and Java library, network processing and cloud processing. The Python 3 module and Java library are distributed alongside the desktop installers for all three operating systems.

According to the comparison page, both editions include photogrammetric triangulation, dense point cloud generation and editing, 3D model generation and texturing, frame, fisheye, spherical and cylindrical camera support, video import, batch processing, GPU acceleration, texture map generation, panorama stitching, flythrough video rendering and 3D PDF export. Georeferenced elevation models and orthomosaics, ground control points, markers and scale bars, target detection, multi-camera, multispectral, thermal, lidar and satellite data, measurements, point cloud classification, DEM editing, Python scripting and the stand-alone Python module and Java library, network and cloud processing and 4D modeling are listed for the Professional edition only. CG Channel described the Standard edition in 2019 as aimed at 3D scanning of people or objects from reference photos and the Professional edition as aimed at land surveys.

For export, the change log records FBX camera export (1.4.1, 2018), binary glTF and X3D model export (1.5.0), normal map export in FBX and OBJ formats (1.6.0 preview, 2019), point cloud upload to Sketchfab (1.4.0 preview, 2017) and Cesium 3D Tiles export for tiled models and point clouds.

Use in VR and AR content

In September 2015, Valve published a three-part "Photogrammetry in VR" guide in its SteamVR announcements. The author wrote that PhotoScan, "from a small Russian company in Saint Petersburg", was the software they had the most experience with. They noted that it had more of a GIS background but had "gained quite a following in the more artistic side of computer graphics", and named Autodesk's 123D Catch and Memento as alternatives. The second part described a full high dynamic range workflow in PhotoScan, from bracketed photos merged to OpenEXR through to OpenEXR texture export for tonemapping at runtime. It also described cleaning up rough architectural scans by tracing a clean mesh in a modeling program and reimporting it into PhotoScan so that the photographs could be projected onto it. For rendering in Unity, the third part recommended textures of at most 8192 by 8192 pixels, unlit textured shaders and no shadow casting. It said that "a 1.5 million triangle mesh from PhotoScan with twelve 8k DXT1-compressed textures should run fine on a typical VR-oriented system". The captured scenes were available in the SteamVR demos as "Iceland Cinder Cone" and "Valve Demo Room".

Road to VR reported in 2016 that PhotoScan was the tool used to create the "Postcards" in Valve's The Lab. The Postcards are scenes of real-world locations recreated with photogrammetry. The same article, which compared Destinations to them, named PhotoScan and RealityCapture as software that creators could use to make scenes for Valve's Destinations tool. The Lab was released on Steam on 5 April 2016.

Game developers also used the software for asset capture. In a March 2014 post, The Astronauts wrote that they were "using Photoscan from Agisoft" to make assets for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, with examples ranging from a boulder captured in 26 photographs to a quarry wall captured in 242. The studio noted that a scanned object usually weighed between 2 and 20 million triangles, so making a usable asset required geometry optimization and retopology. The studio later released a separate VR version, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter VR, on Steam.

In virtual heritage research, Metashape is one of several packages used to turn site photography into VR environments. A 2019 workflow paper on recreating the 11th-century Myin-pya-gu temple in Bagan, Myanmar, for VR considered Agisoft PhotoScan, Bentley ContextCapture and RealityCapture for building the high-polygon mesh. The team chose RealityCapture for its processing speed and because its output mesh size is not limited by the user's RAM, then assembled the experience in Unreal Engine. In a 2023 chapter, Nemeh Rihani of the University of Liverpool described reconstructing the ruined Southern Decumanus of Jerash with Agisoft Metashape and Autodesk Meshmixer. The scene was assembled in Unreal Engine and viewed on an Oculus Quest headset as a virtual walk-through of the reconstructed street.

Academic evaluations

Verhoeven's 2011 paper in Archaeological Prospection tested PhotoScan on aerial photographs of archaeological sites. He wrote that the program implemented state-of-the-art structure-from-motion and other computer vision algorithms behind a simple interface. Using several case studies, he reported that it produced "excellent results from aerial imagery in a minimum of time with almost no effort needed".

Later studies have compared Metashape with other packages, with results that depend on the data and the measures used. In a 2021 study in Sensors on photogrammetry for orthodontics, Pojda and colleagues reconstructed a hairdresser's dummy head from one photo set with three programs and measured how far each mesh deviated from a 3D scan of the head. Metashape had an average distance of 0.212 mm (standard deviation 0.365 mm), against 0.441 mm for COLMAP with MVS and 0.868 mm for Meshroom. The authors wrote that "The best reconstructions, for this set of data, were obtained from the Agisoft Metashape software" and used it for the rest of the work. A 2022 comparison in Drones processed five drone datasets with Metashape 1.7.1, Correlator3D, Pix4Dmapper and WebODM. The authors described Metashape as "one of the most widely used commercial software packages" and used its output as the baseline for coverage comparisons, but found that no single package was the "winner" across all metrics.

Licensing and pricing

Agisoft states that Metashape licenses are not time-limited, and its comparison page lists the node-locked and floating licenses as perpetual; it also lists an annual or pay-per-use service provider license for the Professional edition. Node-locked licenses run on one machine at a time but can be moved to another computer. Floating licenses, which are available for the Professional edition only, let the software be installed on any number of computers, with the number of simultaneous users limited to the number of licenses bought. Educational licenses are available to accredited educational institutions, their students and their employees, and may not be used commercially. Agisoft states that licenses include 12 months of email technical support and free updates up to version 2.x.x. As of October 2026, Agisoft's online store lists node-locked licenses at $179 for the Standard edition and $3,499 for the Professional edition. CG Channel gave the same two prices at the Metashape launch in January 2019.

See also

• Photogrammetry
• Structure from motion
• 3D scanning
• Pix4D
• Polycam