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PanGazer – introduction | |
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PanGazer is a free (and advert-free) application for viewing images: not just regular ‘flat’ images but also 360° spherical and part-spherical panoramas as captured by 360° cameras and drones. PanGazer automatically detects spherical images, so there is no need for a special ‘spherical’ viewer or mode. PanGazer runs on Windows and also on many Windows emulators on Linux and MacOS. Zooming in or out and dragging left and right work the same way on all images, unlike some 360° image viewers. Further, PanGazer always calculates and preserves the known location, direction, tilt, effective lens length, and other details of a view. For example, if you crop then save an image the metadata (Exif, etc.) will reflect the longer focal length resulting from the crop. The screenshot below is a snapshot view of a 360° panorama (this ‘starter panorama’ is included in the package and is shown when you first start PanGazer; the ‘raw’ image is shown at the bottom of this page). Click on the screenshot to see a more detailed version.
Please click on ‘Getting started’ on the left for an overview of the application, or on the other menu items for more specific information. I am currently actively developing PanGazer, so do please send me suggestions for improving PanGazer (click here for contact details »). PanGazer has been written from scratch (sharing most of its 34,000 lines of code with my MapGazer » application), but has been inspired by and depends on the work of many other people; please read my thanks, here.
PanGazer features
PanGazer requirements
PanGazer runs on a Windows personal computer (PC, laptop, or tablet, running Windows 7 or later); it also runs on Windows XP and Windows emulators on Mac OS and Linux, but is not fully tested in those environments.
Both 32-bit and 64-bit executables are included, along with a ‘stub’ 32-bit executable that will start the best main executable. The 32-bit executable will run on 32-bit Windows systems but large panoramas and images (e.g., more than 12,000 × 6,000) may fail to load due to memory fragmentation. With either executable you may have difficulty loading large images if you do not have several GigaBytes of RAM. It is recommended that you run a 64-bit version of Windows and use the 64-bit PanGazer (which also renders faster than the 32-bit PanGazer).
PanGazer does not require an internet connection to run (except for internet-specific features); in particular, the Help pages are included in the package and are accessible when offline.
PanGazer lets you load and view many types of images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc.). When saving an image, PanGazer uses JFIF (the JPEG File Interchange Format, file extension .jpg or .jpeg) so that metadata (geolocation, camera bearing, tilt, zoom, etc.) can be saved with the image using Exif and XMP metadata. Here is a reduced version of the plain (un-projected) PanGazer starter image, stitched from 34 images taken using a DJI Mavic Pro drone (the download package includes a much larger and more detailed image). As a plain image it is quite distorted (the entire bottom row of the image represents a single point). You can download the full-sized panorama (20480×7587 pels, 43MB) by clicking here »; to view this you probably will need to use the 64-bit version of PanGazer on a 64-bit Windows system. You can also view the starter image using Google Maps on a PC (or on the Google Street Map app on a phone): Search for “Bejes, Spain”, click on the ‘little yellow man’ and scroll right to 225m due East of the car parking area at the southern entrance to the village (and about 100m SSW of the church); you should see a small blue circle. Clicking on the circle should display the panorama. This upload of the starter image, saved as a sphere, was done using the Google Street Map app from a mobile phone; see the Sharing Images page for more details.
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PanGazer and these web pages were written by Mike Cowlishaw; Please send me any corrections, suggestions, etc. | |
All content Copyright © Mike Cowlishaw,
2014–2021, except where marked otherwise. All rights reserved.
The pages here, and the PanGazer program, are for non-commercial
use only.
Privacy policy: the Speleotrove website records no personal information and sets no ‘cookies’. However, statistics, etc. might be recorded by the web hosting service. This page was last updated on 2021-06-14 by mfc. |