Good panoramic photo viewer for Microsoft Windows?

by philg

Folks:

I came back from Antarctica with a bunch of panoramic photos made with a Sony DSC-RX100, a truly awesome point and shoot camera that, set to “green idiot mode”, produced far better JPEGs than the $3000 Canon EOS 5D Mark III. The little Sony has a nice feature for showing panoramics on its rear LCD. You press a button and the photo is expanded to occupy the full vertical height of the rear LCD and then slowly scrolls from right to left.

I’d like to replicate this interface on a Microsoft Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer, but so far I can’t find any software that does it. All of the software is either entirely (1) unaware of panoramas and has no option to set the zoom so that the height of the image matches the height of the monitor, (2) a little bit aware and premised on the idea that the viewer wants to be active with a mouse to pan and zoom.

Ideally I would like a slide show that displays one panorama at a time, first shrunken to fit and then panned right to left or left to right. I guess this could be done in Javascript but it seems that the software should exist already somewhere.

Ideas?

Here’s an example of one of the photos (click twice to download the original file):

6 thoughts on “Good panoramic photo viewer for Microsoft Windows?”

  1. iPhoto can do this with Ken Burns effect
    using slideshow feature.
    Ken Burns effect is when you set start and end with time duration
    and iphoto basically move within the picture in zoom or pan fashion.

    So if any Windows Program has this feature. You can look
    for that.

  2. p.s.

    you can even output the ken burns slide as a movie
    into a quicktime file which can even be burned into a DVD.

    so that movie could even be played in your tv
    using some media extenders which play HD H264 files.

  3. p.p.s.

    From wikipedia.

    On the Windows platform, AVS Video Editor, Windows Movie Maker, Pinnacle Studio, Sony Vegas Studio (and Movie), Ulead VideoStudio, Adobe Premiere, PicturesToExe also have pan and zoom features built in or available through third party extensions which may be used to achieve the effect. Microsoft Photo Story is a free application that creates videos with both random and customiseable Ken Burns Effects automatically from selected images. Another free multiplatform Ken Burns effect application is PhotoFilmStrip

  5. Check out krpano (http://www.krpano.com/). It’d integrate nicely into your RDBMS, and seems to have lots of flexibility with display options like autopanning.

    BTW, ICE is great for creating panos in the first place, not for viewing them. It is remarkably fast in doing so, though, and also has a slick option of creating a panorama from a video source. I find it remarkable how much more “immersive” a panorama is when you include imagery from above and below the line of vision that a traditional panorama captures.

    ICE will output to Microsoft’s excellent Photosynth, but I don’t know of any way to configure the Photosynth viewer to autopan. Besides, the synth is hosted on Microsoft’s servers, and while that’s all good and well, I’m not fond of entrusting my imagery to the goodwill of corporations. Hence, the recommended option of KRPano.

  6. philg,
    I am not aware of any free simple software for Windows to do this – however, I would be more than happy to write an application that does that. If there is interest, let me know and I’ll write something up this weekend and toss it up on CodePlex or GitHub.

    -dan

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