panovoyant's dashboard

@Peenie
There is a crucial difference between Photosynth and the panorama stitching software you list. If you ever get out of what you term the 'shallow end of the pool' yourself you will discover that in making a good panorama, all the source images must be shot from the same location. If you want truly seamless results that doesn't mean standing at about the same place for all the shots either. That means taking care to rotate the camera about the entrance pupil of the lens, usually with the help of a very expensive panoramic tripod head. Photosynth handles images shot from diverse locations. But then again since Photosynth is not an image stitching application there is little point in comparing it with image stitchers. If anything it has more in common with photogrammetry based software such as Imagemodeler and Photomodeler. As for your comment about how it looks and performs, if you'd ever used even the best of those applications you listed, you would realise that Photosynth has a top class level of performance in finding point correspondences between large numbers of images. The zooming and image scaling is excellent, I believe having been developed in and ported from a separate research effort. Try to create a point cloud of a density and complexity similar to Photosynth's on Imagemodeler and it will take you all day. I'm sure it is very easy to belittle the effort of the team that created Photosynth. However, I think you should be aware that you in danger of coming across as someone who is criticising it simply because it is a Microsoft product, rather than someone with a considered opinion. – panovoyant, on August 24, 2008 21:46

Embed options for slideshow autoplay and image display duration would be a good start. I think most people will use this in their pages as a very cool image slideshow, so a few more options here would make it far more useful - for example the ability to specify which buttons appear.

I'd also like to see an API that provides access to the control, linked with individually geotagged photos (preserve EXIF fields) so that I can provide external navigation and read back image location.