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Photosynth

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Photosynth
Information
Type 3D photo visualization
Industry Photography, computer vision
Developer Microsoft Live Labs; later Microsoft (Bing and Microsoft Research)
Operating System Windows XP, Windows Vista (2008 launch); iOS, Windows Phone (panorama apps)
Release Date August 20, 2008 (public launch); Technology Preview in 2006


Photosynth was a Microsoft software tool and web service that turned collections of ordinary overlapping photographs into navigable 3D scenes, and later into spherical panoramas and smooth camera-path "synths". It was developed at Microsoft Live Labs from Photo Tourism, a 2006 research system by Noah Snavely and Steven Seitz of the University of Washington and Richard Szeliski of Microsoft Research that used structure from motion to recover where each photo was taken and a sparse 3D model of the scene.[1][2]

Microsoft showed a Technology Preview in 2006 and opened the service to the public on August 20, 2008, when anyone could create synths for free.[3] Microsoft closed the service and website on February 6, 2017, after releasing an offline viewer whose source code the Photosynth team published as open source.[4][5] In a 2012 photogrammetry study, Photosynth was cited as an example of an operational service built on methods that orient unordered photo collections from uncalibrated cameras automatically, without prior orientation information.[6]

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Re-checked all claims, dates, figures and quotes against the cited Photo Tourism, IJCV and Sensors papers, the Microsoft press release, archived Photosynth blog posts, Windows Experience and Microsoft Research blogs, UW News, TED, SIGGRAPH, TechCrunch, SlashGear, Technologizer and GitHub. About review dates.

History

Photo Tourism research

Photo Tourism was presented at SIGGRAPH 2006 by Snavely and Seitz of the University of Washington and Szeliski of Microsoft Research.[7] The system took unstructured photo collections, including images downloaded from Flickr, computed the viewpoint of each photograph and a sparse 3D model of the scene, and let users move between photos in 3D with image-based rendering transitions. Its reconstruction detected SIFT keypoints, matched them across images and refined cameras and points with sparse bundle adjustment. Running times in the paper ranged from a few hours for 120 photos of the Great Wall of China (82 registered) to about two weeks for 2,635 photos of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (597 registered).[2]

According to the University of Washington, early work on the project drew attention at Microsoft's TechFest in March 2006, and Microsoft Live Labs signed a commercial license for the prototype software in August 2006. Within a few months, Microsoft shipped a technology preview of the product it called Photosynth.[8]

Technology Preview (2006-2008)

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, described in a 2007 MSDN interview as the architect behind Photosynth, had founded the visual interface startup Seadragon, which Live Labs acquired. In a 2007 interview he said that Patrice Simard, Live Labs' head of research, brought the University of Washington work to his attention shortly after the Seadragon acquisition, and that Photosynth combined Photo Tourism with Seadragon's multiresolution architecture plus new back-end work to build environments efficiently.[1] In the same interview, Microsoft Group Product Manager Adam Sheppard said that NASA had contacted the team shortly after the Technology Preview was announced at the Web 2.0 conference; Microsoft and NASA then worked on test data sets for the Mars rover, International Space Station and Space Shuttle programs, and published collections from Kennedy Space Center.[1]

Agüera y Arcas demonstrated Photosynth on stage at TED2007 in March 2007 in a talk titled "How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images".[9]

Public launch (2008)

On August 20, 2008, Microsoft Live Labs made Photosynth available worldwide and let users create their own synths for free; until then, the Technology Preview had only allowed viewing.[3][10] Microsoft said a synth needed 20 to 300 photos depending on the size of the place or object, and that finished synths could be viewed on computers running Windows XP or Windows Vista with a broadband connection. The launch included synths made with National Geographic, and Microsoft announced that the Photosynth team would join MSN after the release.[3] The Windows Experience Blog described a 7 MB plug-in for Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and Firefox 2 or 3, a 20 GB storage quota per user, and processing ("synthing") of the photos by the plug-in before the results were uploaded; creating and uploading a synth took from 2 to 30 or more minutes depending on the number of photos.[10]

Bing Maps, panoramas and mobile apps (2009-2015)

In May 2009, TechCrunch reported that Microsoft was bringing Photosynth into its Virtual Earth mapping service, using Silverlight so that users on both Mac and PC could bring their synths into the maps. The same release added commercial licensing options, privacy controls and one-click highlighting. Microsoft said at the time that users had uploaded more than 12 million photos in 350,000 synths since the public release in August 2008.[11] On December 1, 2009, the beta of the Silverlight-based Bing Maps launched with Photosynth integration; the Photosynth team said more than 14,000 geotagged synths containing 1,435,000 photos could be explored from the map. A "geoalignment" tool released in October 2009 let creators set the true size and orientation of a synth's point cloud on the map.[12]

Microsoft Research states that Photosynth gained Image Composite Editor (ICE) in 2010, a stitcher that combines overlapping photos into a full-resolution 360-degree panorama, and that Bing released a mobile panorama capture and display app for iOS devices in 2011, followed by a Windows Phone app in 2012.[13] The free iOS app, released in April 2011 for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, fourth-generation iPod touch and iPad 2, stitched panoramas up to full spherical 360-degree views and shared them to Facebook, Bing Maps or a Photosynth.net account.[14] The Windows Phone version arrived on May 29, 2012 for Windows Phone 7.5 or later on phones with at least 512 MB of RAM. The Photosynth team said it was the only mobile app able to stitch a full sphere, 360 degrees horizontally and vertically, and that it used stitching and blending algorithms from Microsoft Research's Image Composite Editor.[15]

On July 10, 2015, the team announced that it was retiring both mobile apps and withdrawing them from their stores, saying the cloud-processed Photosynth Preview technology was a more immersive way to capture a place than the apps' spherical panoramas.[16]

New Photosynth technical preview (2013-2016)

On December 10, 2013, Microsoft announced a new generation of Photosynth, with example synths and sign-up for a technical preview program at photosynth.net/preview.[17] TechCrunch described it as the third generation of the technology, with four kinds of synth: spin, panorama, walk and wall.[18] The team described the new synths as being as smooth as Steadicam video but interactive, with viewers able to stop anywhere and zoom in.[17] Microsoft Research said that restricting navigation to a circular path, either an outward-looking panorama from a fixed spot or a spin around an object, made transitions between photos much smoother.[13] One showcase synth, by photographer David Breashears, followed a high-altitude helicopter flight to Mount Everest; it took one minute to play, and each frame contained 60 megapixels.[17] A March 2014 update added comments, following other users, featured-synth notifications and optional map locations for geotagged synths, and removed the separate sign-up for the preview.[19]

Shutdown (2016-2017)

On November 4, 2016, the Photosynth team announced that Microsoft would decommission the Photosynth website and services and shut the site down on February 6, 2017. The team said it regularly reviewed its products based on customer use and feedback. It released an offline viewer for Windows and Mac that could open exported panoramas and "Tech Preview" synths, but not original synths, and said Microsoft would keep no data after the shutdown. No tool for creating new synths was released.[20] On November 17, 2016, the team published the viewer's source code on GitHub so that others could maintain it.[5] The repository describes it as an Electron-based app for viewing local Photosynth panoramas and synths and is licensed under the MIT License.[21]

The service closed on February 6, 2017. In its final post, the team wrote that "Key parts of the Photosynth code live on in other Microsoft products".[4] In December 2017, Microsoft added a Photosynth panorama feature to its Pix camera app for iOS; TechCrunch reported Microsoft's statement that the feature used some of the technology behind the original platform.[22]

How it works

The original Photosynth used the same underlying data as Photo Tourism: estimated camera positions and a sparse set of 3D points. Snavely, Seitz and Szeliski's 2008 journal paper describes the Technology Preview interface. As the user moved the mouse, the system suggested other photos; if a close-up of the object under the cursor existed, a semi-transparent quadrilateral highlighted it, and clicking moved the virtual view to that photo. A "splatter" mode laid photos out in 2D, with the selected photo in the center and the rest arranged in a spiral by similarity. To browse large collections of high-resolution images over a network, Photosynth streamed image data with Seadragon, which worked out which parts of which photos were visible on screen and at what resolution, and sent only that data.[23]

For the 2013 generation, photos were uploaded to servers on Microsoft Azure. The pipeline found overlapping features, built a point cloud of stable features, fitted each photo to that cloud to estimate its camera location, and calculated a smooth path through or near those locations. The result was viewed in a browser through WebGL.[17] Microsoft Research explained that the team estimated depth from parallax between overlapping photos and projected images onto coarse 3D surfaces made of a small number of planes, rather than a single plane, to make transitions more convincing. The Bing and Microsoft Research teams moved the processing to Azure because spins were too demanding for small devices.[13]

Photosynth versions and milestones
Date Milestone
2006 Photo Tourism presented at SIGGRAPH; Microsoft Live Labs licenses the prototype and ships a Technology Preview[8]
August 20, 2008 Public launch with free synth creation for Windows XP and Vista[3]
December 1, 2009 Synths integrated into the beta of Silverlight-based Bing Maps[12]
2010 Image Composite Editor panorama stitching added[13]
April 2011 Free iOS panorama app[14]
May 29, 2012 Windows Phone panorama app[15]
December 10, 2013 Technical preview of spin, panorama, walk and wall synths[17]
July 10, 2015 Mobile apps retired and withdrawn from stores[16]
November 2016 Shutdown announced; offline viewer released and open-sourced[20][5]
February 6, 2017 Service and website closed[4]

Uses and research

The University of Washington's 2007 announcement suggested that real estate agencies, museums and hotels could use the technology for a virtual tour, because viewers could zoom in on details such as a restaurant menu or a painting.[8] NASA worked with the Photosynth team on test data sets and on public collections from Kennedy Space Center.[1]

Researchers also used Photosynth for measurement work. In a 2012 study in Sensors, Tomi Rosnell and Eija Honkavaara of the Finnish Geodetic Institute generated point clouds from images taken by a small quadcopter drone. They exported camera orientations and colored point clouds from Photosynth with a separate tool, SynthExporter, and compared them with output from BAE Systems' SOCET SET photogrammetry software. They found that the Photosynth point clouds were "sparser and noisier", largely because the method was not optimized for dense point cloud generation, while the photogrammetric processing produced dense and accurate point clouds.[6]

Relevance to VR and AR

Photo Tourism, the research behind Photosynth, framed its goal in terms of presence. Its introduction describes image-based rendering's aim of evoking "a visceral sense of presence" from photographs and the hope that such methods would one day allow "virtual tourism" of the world's important sites. The paper lists the ACM Computing Classification category "Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities".[2] The authors' 2008 journal paper compared the system to the Aspen Movie Map. It also proposed that a tourist could photograph a scene and see transferred annotations superimposed on it, and noted that, combined with a head-mounted display, this could offer a portable, computer-vision-based augmented reality system, citing work by Steven Feiner and colleagues.[23]

Photosynth itself was used through desktop web browsers and phone apps. Its connection to 3D capture lies in its processing: the pipeline analyzed overlapping photos, built a point cloud of stable features and estimated a camera location for every photo, and a 2012 photogrammetry study named it as an operational service based on automatic orientation methods for unordered photo collections.[17][6]

Reception

Introducing his 2007 interview with Agüera y Arcas on an MSDN blog, Dan Waters wrote that Agüera y Arcas's Photosynth demo had received a standing ovation.[1] Writing about the 2008 launch for Technologizer, Harry McCracken wrote that he was "more taken with the possibilities of what Photosynth and Photosynth-like technologies may do in the future than with the current version". He added that taking photos that would work well looked like painstaking work and that viewing and creating synths both required Windows.[24]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Dan Waters (2007-08-07). "Interview with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, The Man Behind Photosynth". MSDN Blogs (Microsoft Learn archive). Microsoft. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/dawate/interview-with-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-the-man-behind-photosynth. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski (2006-07). "Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D". ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 25, no. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2006), pp. 835-846. doi:10.1145/1141911.1141964. https://phototour.cs.washington.edu/Photo_Tourism.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Microsoft Live Labs Introduces Photosynth, a Breakthrough Visual Medium". Microsoft Source. Microsoft. 2008-08-20. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/08/20/microsoft-live-labs-introduces-photosynth-a-breakthrough-visual-medium/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Photosynth Team (2017-02-06). "Microsoft Photosynth has been shut down". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2017id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2017/02/06/microsoft-photosynth-has-been-shut-down/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Photosynth Team (2016-11-17). "Photosynth viewer code now available as open source". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2017id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2016/11/17/photosynth-viewer-code-now-available-as-open-source/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Tomi Rosnell, Eija Honkavaara (2012-01-04). "Point Cloud Generation from Aerial Image Data Acquired by a Quadrocopter Type Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and a Digital Still Camera". Sensors, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 453-480. https://doi.org/10.3390/s120100453. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  7. ↑ "Photo tourism: exploring photo collections in 3D by Snavely, Seitz and Szeliski". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives. ACM SIGGRAPH. https://history.siggraph.org/learning/photo-tourism-exploring-photo-collections-in-3d-by-snavely-seitz-and-szeliski/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "Photo software creates 3-D world". UW News. University of Washington. 2007-02-14. https://www.washington.edu/news/2007/02/14/photo-software-creates-3-d-world/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  9. ↑ Blaise Agüera y Arcas (2007-03). "How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images". TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Brandon LeBlanc (2008-08-21). "Photosynth Goes Public: Create Your Own Today!". Windows Experience Blog. Microsoft. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2008/08/21/photosynth-goes-public-create-your-own-today-2/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  11. ↑ Robin Wauters (2009-05-07). "Double Happiness: Microsoft Integrates Photosynth With Virtual Earth". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/07/where-awesomeness-meets-microsoft-integrates-photosynth-with-virtual-earth. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Photosynth Team (2009-12-01). "Photosynths in Bing Maps. Dive in!". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2017id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2009/12/01/photosynths-in-bing-maps-dive-in/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 "A New Spin for Photosynth". Microsoft Research Blog. Microsoft. 2014-01-07. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/new-spin-photosynth/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Rue Liu (2011-04-18). "Microsoft Photosynth Panorama App With Bing Maps Goes iOS Before WP7". SlashGear. https://www.slashgear.com/microsoft-photosynth-panorama-app-with-bing-maps-goes-ios-before-wp7-18146753/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Photosynth Team (2012-05-29). "Photosynth for Windows Phone is here". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2017id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2012/05/29/photosynth-for-windows-phone-is-here/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Photosynth Team (2015-07-10). "Photosynth mobile apps being retired". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2017id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2015/07/10/photosynth-mobile-apps-being-retired/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 17.5 Photosynth Team (2013-12-10). "Dreamlike 3D: The new Photosynth technology has arrived". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/20131213094031/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/photosynth/archive/2013/12/10/dreamlike-3d-the-new-photosynth-technology-has-arrived.aspx. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  18. ↑ Sarah Perez (2013-12-10). "Microsoft Releases 3rd Generation Of Photosynth, Turns 3D Images Into Video-Like Experiences". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/10/imicrosoft-releases-3rd-generation-of-photosynth-turns-3d-images-into-video-like-experiences/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  19. ↑ Photosynth Team (2014-03-04). "The Photosynth Tech Preview gets an update". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2016id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2014/03/04/the-photosynth-tech-preview-gets-an-update/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Photosynth Team (2016-11-04). "Photosynth to Shut Down February 6, 2017". Photosynth Blog (MSDN). Microsoft. https://web.archive.org/web/2016id_/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/photosynth/2016/11/04/photosynth-to-shut-down/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  21. ↑ "photosynth/offlineViewer". GitHub. https://github.com/photosynth/offlineViewer. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  22. ↑ Frederic Lardinois (2017-12-20). "Photosynth returns as a feature in Microsoft's Pix camera app". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/photosynth-returns-as-a-feature-in-microsofts-pix-camera-app/. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski (2008). "Modeling the World from Internet Photo Collections". International Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 189-210. doi:10.1007/s11263-007-0107-3. https://phototour.cs.washington.edu/ModelingTheWorld_ijcv07.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
  24. ↑ Harry McCracken (2008-08-21). "Microsoft's Photosynth: Hard Work, Cool Results". Technologizer. https://technologizer.com/2008/08/21/microsofts-photosynth-hard-work-cool-results/index.html. Retrieved 2026-10-06.
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