David Gedye's dashboard

We noticed some other issues with our back-end systems yesterday. Your difficulties could be related. Our apologies!

Nathanael's advice is good. I'd go one step further though. To be completely sure that no old records affect your new synth, you need to "touch" your photos so that we don't recognize them as the same.

Changing the filenames won't do it, it's about the content of the files...
The easiest way to do this in Windows is to select them ,right click and select properties, then change one of the editable properties, such a "Author".

Please let us know whether re-synthing (with or without the "touch") solves your problem.

David.

Chris -- I don't know what the delay was, but if you re-send the inquiry to me at dgedye at microsoft.com, I'll make sure you get an answer quickly.

Apologies for the lack of response to date.
David.

Wim -- I'm the group program manager for Photosynth at Microsoft, which means that I lead the engineering team, and have a strong voice on the business team.

I fear that either the news coverage or our statements have been confusing, so let me try to set the record straight.

Firstly, we have always intended to keep Photosynth use free for individuals and small business users. (I say "intend" because of course I can't make blanket statements that we would never charge people -- just that we have no plans at all in that direction.)

Yesterday's announcement was aimed at medium to large businesses who want to use Photosynth to promote their real estate, hotels, tourist destinations, etc. etc. The model is that these businesses shoot their own photos, create their own Photosynths and embed them on their site. And yes -- they pay us if they need lots of storage space or cause us to incur lots of bandwidth charges for serving up the images. Why shouldn't they? Income from them can offset the operations cost we incur for all the free accounts.

Also -- we don't currently generate revenue by selling ads on the Photosynth site, and I hope we can keep it that way. But if that's what it takes to keep the free service going, we'd consider it.

It looks like you were also concerned was that a business might be making money by embedding YOUR synth on their site. Is that correct?

Our solution to that is the Creative Commons choice that we offer when you create your synth. if you don't want other people (individuals or companies) to embed your synth, mark the photo rights as All Rights Reserved. If you want to allow only non-commercial entities to embed your synth, mark it as "Attribution -- Non Commercial". It's all under your control.

(It is of course true that some people or companies may violate these licensing terms, but that's the same issue we all face when we publish individual photos, and others rip them in violation of the license terms under which they were posted.)

I hope this helps you understand what we're doing with Photosynth.

David Gedye.
dgedye @ microsoft.com

For now, you can't remove photos from a synth. However, if you repeat the synth with some photos that you've already uploaded it will not upload them a 2nd time, so the process shoudl be much faster.

David.

Hello Ian --

Photosynth converts all photos into the DeepZoom tiled image format. This format includes tiles of the original resolution + factors of 2 down-samples.

The analysis parts of the synther do not use the full resolution of the images. Currently we only pay attention to the first 1.5 megapixels worth of data, so features that do not show up at that scale get ingored.

Does that answer your question?
David.

We are planning a manual fixing feature, but forcing it to match places in photos that it doesn't think match is one of the trickier parts, and we aren't going to be tackling that part of the problem soon.

One way *you* can fix these problems is to take another photo of the area that should match from an in-between angle and zoom-level.

Note that fixing by adding photos is pretty fast. Even though it completely recomputes the synth, it doesn't re-upload photos it has already uploaded, so you don't need to wait around for minutes or hours as you did the first time.

Hope that helps...
David.

Sorry -- We only support XP and Vista. There's a chance that our Silverlight viewer might run on Win'95/98 but I'm not sure. No promises! (http://photosynth.com/silverlight/)

The Angels and Demons game runs our Direct 3D viewer, and so is much fussier about graphics hardware and graphics drivers. What IE error do you get?

When you get that message "We wish Photosynth would work for you...." it is generally caused by your driver or graphcis card claiming that it has the capabilities that Photosynth needs, but then not delivering. Updating your graphics drivers sometimes helps, but not always unfortunately.

Our new Silverlight-based viewer should not suffer from this problem. It's experimental now, but will be fully integrated into our site within a few months. To use it now, you take the URL of the synth you'd like to see, then go to http://photosynth.net/silverlight and plug your URL into the form field at the bottom of that page.

Not too convenient, I know!

This message comes up with your graphics card or driver claims to be able to do everything that Photosynth needs, but when we tell it what to do, it fails. If you've tried a reboot and this still happens, then I;m sorry -- this version of Photosynth won't work on your computer. We're working on a more general-purpose version but it wasn't ready in time for the Angels and Demos project.

Please give us the URL of the page that isn't working....; we'll take a look at it.

I think Drew and I are answering two different questions. I was talking about the recommendation in our Photography Guide to capture each point in the scene in three photos. Drew was talking about the fact that the "synther" won't start until you've given it three photos. Not sure which issue you were questioning, but you've got answers to both of them now!

Ray -- please write your own bundle adjuster that can produce consistently decent 3D models with less than 3 matches on a point. We'd love to license it from you!

Sorry -- we only run on Windows (vis Direct3D and Silverlight) and Mac (via Silverlight). Due to the need to have pretty sophisticated 3D, porting it to Linux would require some dedicated linux or OpenGL programming. We can't sign up for that.

Sorry this is happening to you. Let's try to work this out.

Firstly, the Silverlight viewer is the one most likely to work on the widest range of machines. What happens when you go to http://photosynth.com/silverlight?

No fair -- you've stolen all our good ideas :-)
The only one of these that doesn't sound good to us is #5, but if you swap "Google" for "Live" we agree completely!

We're working on "synth linking" now, which will help #1, #2, and #4. It's tricky stuff, so it may take us a little while...

If you click on the "grid" icon you'll se that all your shots are there -- it's just that Photosynth couldn't connect them all.

Did you read the Photography Guide? Start here: http://blogs.msdn.com/photosynth/arch...

Don't be discouraged!

You must be running Windows on your MAC if the install happened at all. Right? What message did you get when it later failed?

Even though our Direct3D client failed, we also have a Silverlight client. Go to http://photosynth.com/Silverlight and you can see some great synths, or go to http://cnn.com/themoment or msnbc.com to see great Inauguration synths