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PanGazer – introduction |
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PanGazer is an image viewer for both 360° spherical images (as captured by 360° cameras and drones) and regular ‘flat’ images. PanGazer automatically detects spherical images, so there is no need for a special ‘spherical’ viewer or mode. Uniquely, PanGazer preserves the location, direction of view, focal length, and other known details of a view when saved. Unlike a simple screenshot this means that you can compose and save multiple ‘flat’ images from any spherical image and each will have the correct geographical and photographic metadata for that particular view. See below for a full list of features. PanGazer is free (and advert-free); it runs on Windows and also on Windows emulators on Linux and MacOS. The screenshot below is a view of a 360° panorama; this ‘starter image’ is shown when you first start PanGazer (the source 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 37,000 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 10 or later); it also runs on Windows 7, Windows XP, and Windows emulators on Mac OS and Linux, but is not fully tested in those environments.
Both 64-bit and 32-bit executables are included, along with a ‘stub’ 32-bit executable that will start the best main executable on any version of Windows. 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 if possible.
PanGazer does not require an internet connection to run (except for internet-specific features); in particular, all 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,
2014–2023, 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 2023-06-27 by mfc. |