Kolor was a French company which created, notably, Autopano Giga, a great panorama stitching program. GoPro took over Kolor in 2015 and subsequently shut it down last month:
After 14 years of creating world-class image stitching software and products that drove advancement in the world of immersive media, Kolor will be closing.
The nice thing about open-source is that that can never happen.
In Autopano Giga’s wake, here is a list of significant alternative panorama stitching solutions:
To the best of my knowledge, the only two actively maintained and serious panorama stitching programs are Hugin and PTGui. Runner-ups are Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) which is free but appears to be dead, and Panoweaver which appears to still be maintained but is ridiculously priced. The rest of the programs are to panorama stitching what Microsoft Paint is to GIMP.
Having tested a few of the programs available today (they mostly work in wine), regardless whether commercial, gratis or libre, I personally concluded that the best long-term solution is to support Hugin’s development, as it is already as powerful as the best commercial solutions, but could use some user interface and workflow improvements.
Do you, or anyone else here, know a way to support Hugin without being a programmer?
Not only the UI needs some rework, but the homepage looks very old too.
I still have an old (2011) 32 bit Autopano (I was using 32 bit PCLOS at the time) that still works in kubuntu 16.04 (with 32 bit support) Looks like this https://i.imgur.com/97uGuRW.jpg Very self contained, no installation. Very automatic, hit the big green button.
Hugin these days is very good, worth supporting. If you do not make many panoramas, then the appimage is, at long last, working ok.
One that is not mentioned much is NIP2, Open source. More for stitching mosaics but good for large images. I did a demo for a guy once. https://youtu.be/jXAqv6v8j4g shows the basics.
File a request in your distribution’s bug tracker to make sure it ships the latest version of Hugin. This ensures that every user of your distro can take advantage of the newest features and fixed bugs, and also ensures that their bug reports will be based on recent-ish code.
Write good bug reports and file good feature requests when things don’t work as they should. Offer solutions for specific things in the UI which could be improved. One small thing per report. For a guide on writing good bug reports, see: How to write useful bug reports - RawPedia
Do the above in the correct place: Hugin in Launchpad
This forum is not Hugin’s bug tracker.
Spread the word. The more people use it, the more of the above happens, and the higher chance that a new contributor gets involved.
Yes, Hugin absolutely needs a new website, and as their current website’s content is largely obsolete and outdated, that shouldn’t be too difficult to do.
If you make money using Hugin or use it at your business, consider supporting Hugin developers directly (if that’s possible), or the second-tier contributors such pixls.us if “we” make a new website for them. This applies to all of the projects here. Doing the dumbest shit takes time, you have no idea, and “free software” is far from free for the people who create it.
There is also a hugin appimage by @Carmelo_DrRaw that has been working well for me! Hugin is one of those packages that seems to be out of date everywhere.
I’ve made a small research an it looks like that hugin is a 1,5 developers show. Nearly all contributions this year are from Thomas Modes with some help from Bruno Postle. I have not seen any way to make donations to them.
My plan now is to fix some pages in the panotools.org wiki to get at least some of the FOSS pages there up to date. (The Gimp page will be my first target. But I need a login first.)
Perhaps our webpage emergency team (@patdavid, @paperdigits) can ask if there is need for getting the homepage up to date.
Hugin is one of those packages that seems to be out of date everywhere.
I just checked Ubuntu and the package is up to date. Never the less for @Carmelo_DrRaw to provide an appimage.
I have tried to reach out the hug in folks to see if they want to make the appimage more “official”, opened a launchpad “white paper” for that, but got no answer so far… maybe you know a better way? The bug tracker does not seem to be appropriate for such topics.
There are simply not enough polite words to describe how pissed off I am with these news.
There were two apps with GUI to stitch panos - Kolor Autopano and Hugin. Now there is only one left dying
OMG, I rely on Autopano Giga for my business every day. It seems if I ever move to a newer camera I’m doomed. And I wanted to move to Canon EOS R as early as next month :’(
Until you find a free software replacement that meets your needs, Autopano works very well with TiFF files as input.
Did you really mean Autopano?
OMG, I rely on Autopano Giga for my business every day. It seems if I ever move to a newer camera I’m doomed.
Is the Autopano licence bundled to the camera? Never the less I think you should now start to test the alternatives. And please report back what you chose and why.
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