Totaal

Photosynth has been around as an idea for a couple of years now, anybody I know who has heard about it was massively impressed and excited about it. It’s the combination of a couple of fantastic bits of software, one spacially tags photos and the other recognises features in the photos and relates them with other shots. Below is a link to the presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft.

Essentially Photosynth promised to pull all of the geotagged photos from sites like Flickr and present them into one “shared digital memory”. Sure, it wouldve been massive if they had made good on the original promise of making this social but as is, two years in, it’s still on a walled garden basis. When you sign up to the site to use the app you have to upload your shots to the Photosynth servers and install some other software, dont get me wrong the end results are stunning but as someone who thought that it would revolutionise the world of photgraphy and the social space I do feel a touch underwhelmed.

Perhaps the most pertinent thing in all of this was that it is Microsoft that brought this project together, typically they seem to have wanted to keep their cards close to their chest. Maybe I’m doing them a disservice, maybe they cant align the system with Flickr’s API or something, either way though we are missing out and it’s a shame. Photosynth would be going great guns now.

As it is though it’s still a great tool. Check out these these lovely examples of the Rio Duoro in Porto (Look out for the bridge by Gustave Eifel), The Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Gorsdale Scar in the Yorkshire Dales.