When will I be able to upload my own photos?

We want to provide this capability as soon as we can, but there are some real technical hurdles to solve before we're ready for primetime. We're still learning what works and what doesn't with the recognition algorithms, improving them as we go. It's also very computationally intensive; the processing to build a collection can take hours or days at the moment. We're working on these issues, but we're not going to release anything until we're happy with the results. Please stay tuned to the blog for updates.

I get an error "Unsupported Graphics Device". What's going on?

Photosynth makes heavy use of your graphics hardware. We have worked hard to make most graphics cards work with Photosynth, but there are cards that don�t support all of the features Photosynth needs. The following graphics cards are not supported:

Manufacturer Card Type
MatroxMillennium G400
Millennium G450
Millennium G550
NVIDIARiva 128
Riva TNT
Riva TNT2
Vanta
ATIRage 128
Rage XL
Rage Mobility
All-In-Wonder 128
S3Unichrome
ProSavage
Savage IX
3dfxVoodoo5
TridentCyberBlade
Intel810G
815G
845G
855G
865G

How do I turn on graphics hardware acceleration?

Some installations of Windows have hardware acceleration turned off.

Make sure that Direct3D and DirectDraw acceleration are enabled

  1. Click Start, click Run, type dxdiag, and then click OK.
  2. On the Display tab, make sure that Direct3D Acceleration and DirectDraw Acceleration are turned on. If they're disabled, click Enable.
  3. Click Exit.
Make sure that hardware acceleration is set to Full

  1. Click Start, click Run, type desk.cpl, and then click OK.
  2. On the Settings tab, click Advanced.
  3. On the Troubleshoot tab, make sure that the Hardware acceleration slider is set to Full.
  4. Click OK, and then click OK again.
  5. Close and then restart your Internet browser.
Make sure that you have the most recent display driver

If you've confirmed that Direct3D is enabled and that hardware acceleration is set to Full, make sure that you have the most recent display drivers for your display adapter. Contact the hardware manufacturer to obtain the most recent display drivers for your display adapter.

Note
Hardware acceleration may be disabled after you update the display drivers. Also, you may need to restart your computer after you make any of these changes.

I am running Windows under Parallels on my Intel-based Mac. Can I run Photosynth?

Photosynth requires hardware Direct3D acceleration, which is not provided by Parallels. If you'd like to try it on your Intel-based Macintosh, booting into Windows using Boot Camp allows for Direct3D hardware acceleration using your Mac's video card.

The photos never show up. What's going on?

Sometimes images are black, missing, or garbled, even though the point cloud seems to have fully loaded. The issue seems to appear most frequently on Toshiba laptops that have the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card, such as the M200.

The most current driver provided by Toshiba for this graphics card is v46.44. There is a more recent version available, but since the Go5200 is built in, NVIDIA doesn't support it directly. You can force an update by going to the link below and following the instructions there:

http://www.fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/geforce-fx-go5200-with-latest-forceware-drivers/

If you are seeing these symptoms but you don't have a Go5200 card, please send us an email letting us know what card you have, so we can learn more about this problem.

How do I force the upgrade to the new version?

Although our new installer doesn't have any functional changes, we nonetheless wanted to make it available to those of you who have already installed Photosynth. The new installer is available for download here. After running the installer, you will need to close and restart your browser in order for the newly installed version to be utilized.