Praça do Comércio, Lisboa, Portugal

This is a very nice synth. Very impressive. It appears that you've also been bitten by the Photosynth "bug". Very nice work... what kind of computer are you using to create the synths? 950 photos is quite large, how long did this take to synth?

It just occured to me that you may not be waiting for this to complete. If it helps, your synth completed uploading at 9:37PM EST/GMT-5.

Thanks for your kind words, Tan. You were right - I wasn't waiting for it to finish. I started it on the 10th, a bit after midnight. I'm lucky enough to be able to use a large server, with 8 single-core Xeon processors and 20 GB of RAM. The synther has its limits - this synth started huge, with nearly 1800 photos (I know, I know, that's too much but I wanted to try, anyway). I had to keep on removing photos after 'experiencing a network problem' a few times during the upload of the last photo. It was fun doing it.

Congratulations on your accomplishment! - This is an incredible representation.

I'm really glad you responded! I'm also trying to find the limits of the synther. I've got a synth of about 2200 photos that can't process. I tried synthing the 2200 photos and failed on my dual-quad-core xeon 32GB server, so I removed 100 photos each time until it succeeded. Much to my surprise, I wasn't able to process anything over 800 photos at a time (3MB per photo). That's when I switched to me desktop (dual quad core xeon with 4GB RAM) and had the same results. Since my server with 32GB RAM wasn't able to do more than my desktop with 4GB, I haven't used my server since. Thanks for the information! This should help me with my synthing too!

The synther is a 32-bit application, so the address space is limited to 2GB per process. So, 32GB isn't going to work any better than 4 GB.

This is a really impressive synth. You really captured a lot of detail here.

Thanks for all your comments. I've been using the synther on different computers, starting with 2 GB, going through 4 and 6 GB, until the current machine with 20 GB. Memory does matter, although the Photosynth process runs in 32-bit space. Synths that stopped with 4 GB were finished with 6 GB. When 6 GB weren't enough, I started using 20 GB. Even so, before trying this last synth, I ran another one with close to 1050 photos and it bombed with a network error. So, things still work by trial and error up to a certain point.

I know I'm commenting on ancient history but for what it's worth, the limits of the synther are not defined by a hard number of photos or the size (either resolution or megabytes) of the photos, but rather the number of image features in each image and how many of the images correspond to one location.

The limit, in my experience, is defined solely by a maximum number of image features and how many of them correspond to each another. The more intensive any one part of the synth, the more strenuous the scene reconstruction becomes as the number of photos increase past the hundreds. One method I have found to sidestep this choking point, if you have more than enough coverage, is to thin out the images for any given version of the synth by only using odd or even numbered images. The other obvious alternative is to simply break the scene into discrete objects and have some good overlap among your synths of the place (i.e. the end of one overlaps the start of the next).

Oh, also, I meant to say that the reason that resolution shouldn't matter is that all synthing uses only a 1.5 version of each photo to do the matching.

I wholeheartedly endorse the uploading of the full resolution photos, though, both for viewing as well as being able to see more dense pointclouds generated from the full resolution photos in the future.

Thanks Nathanael. That approach you mentioned might prove interesting. I have a couple of (very) large synths in the making, still trying to optimize them.