Why I revived Photosynth
This is my love story with Microsoft’s app and service, Photosynth, which first ended tragically but now has a happy ending thanks to some modern javascript magic:
You can view Photosynth on the Internet Archive now!
On February 6, 2017, Photosynth was about to disappear forever. I couldn’t let it happen without trying to preserve as much as possible of the content captured by all these photographers.
The personal story behind my motivation
I was a 20 — something-year-old Frenchman when I saw Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ jaw-dropping Photosynth Ted talk. It was so inspirational that I decided to learn computer vision on my own. I wanted to understand the science behind the magic that turns lots of images into 3D objects. I blogged about my visual experiments as “dddexperiments”. Eventually, I reverse-engineered some parts of Microsoft Photosynth and turned it into toolkits that have been widely used (>20k downloads). I also wrote a Google Chrome extension, which, when enabled, replaced the official Silverlight viewer used on photosynth.net with my WebGL version. That was the final straw for the Photosynth team: They had to hire this guy in France who was already working on their product :).
I finally received an email asking if I was interested in joining the team. The answer was easy but moving wasn’t. I had to put all my belongings in a tiny box and leave all my family and friends behind. The actual move was also not smooth as it took almost a year to get a work visa.
I finally arrived in the U.S., met Blaise, and started working on the Photosynth technical preview. I was the main developer working on the WebGL viewer. I also met my wonderful wife at Microsoft and now have a beautiful 16-month old son (showing how dedicated I am to writing this as personal time is at a premium).
That was the feel-good side of the story. The other side is that 2 years after I joined Microsoft, Blaise left to go to Google. Photosynth was his “pet project” and was thus put on the “back burner” before being officially shut down on February 6, 2017.
I realized that Blaise’s departure meant my dream project was going to get less traction inside Microsoft and thus I decided to follow him to Google one year later (before the official shutdown).
The key takeaway from my experience is: Be prepared for the day your dream project will die. I wasn’t and it took me quite some time to find a way to fix that while simultaneously having a day job at Google and having to take care of a toddler.
I also wanted to save Photosynth because:
- My parents sold their main business, a fish farm that they built themselves from scratch, which included the house where I grew up for 20 years. Thus, I scanned the place using Photosynth technology to preserve my childhood memory. Little did I know that I will have to preserve the memory of Photosynth too!
- I also felt guilty last year when Notre-Dame burnt and I wasn’t able to share more easily a Photosynth of the interior of the cathedral captured by Serge Ramelli, which was sitting on my hard drive as a ZIP file.
Photosynth preserved on the Internet Archive
After spending countless hours, I finally managed to host the Photosynth content that I downloaded from photosynth.net before the website’s shutdown on the Internet Archive. The “how” it happened is a bit technical thus I created another post dedicated only to this question.
Now you can view all the Photosynth heroes on the Internet Archive. The gallery page is as follows:
I created a landing page with links toward the official gallery page and some experimental new pages: another gallery view, a map view, and a list page.
I’ve also uploaded some screengrabs to the Internet Archive that I captured right before Photosynth’s official shutdown on February 6, 2017.
A note for anyone working on the next cool web product
I know that you already have a lot on your plate. You must be thinking about performance, portability, privacy, security, accessibility, etc. I just hope that this article will inspire you to also consider the archivist’s point of view.
Here are a few things that you can do to help:
- Let your users download/export their content.
- Have an offline viewer (open source if possible).
- Have a shutdown plan (making open-sourcing your viewer as easy as toggling a GitHub repo from private to public, having routine/tools to bulk export content IDs, user IDs and anything to help the crawling and downloading of your content by the users themselves or the ArchiveTeam).
If you are interested in the javascript magic behind this restoration process, I wrote another post detailing the work involved. It should apply to any web project with dynamic content that needs to be preserved on the Internet Archive.
Closing thoughts
The other main reason I worked on preserving Photosynth is that one day when my son asks me what I do for work and why I moved to the U.S., I will have something tangible that I can show him. And this is only possible thanks to the Internet Archive, which is keeping the light on for future generations (please consider donating to them).
— Henri (forever photosynther).
