timwarr.net

Recently I have been playing around Image Composite Editor (ICE) and have found it a really good, simple (and free!) tool for stitching photo panoramas.  Therefore I have been re-visiting some photo panoramas I have taken over the years and stitching them in ICE. 

The problem I have always had is that panoramas are great fun to take and stitch together, but once you have them they are an awkward shape/size for hard-copies and I have never really found a great format to publish them online.  However the cool thing about ICE is that it lets you easily publish your stitched panoramas as either HD View tilesets or Silverlight Deep Zoom tilesets.  It even creates the HTML pages to view the tilesets for you!  Deep zoom is my preferred delivery mechanism as it provides a fast end user experience, while allowing rich zooming in to explore the detail.  Oh and it is relatively shiny and new as well.

The Results

So here are some of the results (click on the thumbnails to see the panoramas).  You will be prompted to download the Silverlight control if you do not already have it.

So how do you do it?

First download ICE

Start it up and then go  File – New.  You will be prompted to select the images to make the panorama:

It will then read the source images and start making your panorama:

Voila:

If you want square edges use the Auto Crop function:

To do this:

Finally choose your export format.  Set the scale to 100% if you want a really high resolution panorama:

And hit:

It creates the tileset for you:

And automatically creates and opens the HTML page for you:

To Deploy:

Just copy the files ICE created for you (in the same relative structure) to your hosting environment:

Happy panoramas!