14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has officially retired Photosynth, after previously warning users in November to save their data and prevent losses.
Photosynth was a service dedicated to creating panoramas and storing them online, and it was the company’s go-to destination after discontinuing the mobile app in 2015. The website provided the exact same functionality, and Microsoft encouraged the transition to the service in an effort to keep users on board despite its decision to discontinue the companion smartphone apps.
Photosynth, however, has quickly become an obsolete product, and Microsoft decided to retire it most likely because of the dropping number of users. Parts of Photosynth have also been integrated into other Microsoft products, and Redmond says the service has also inspired some other photo services out there during the nine years it’s been around.
If you didn’t move your photos, they’re lost
Users who didn’t recover their panoramic photos from Photosynth before the demise can no longer do so, and Microsoft swears that a copy is not saved because “these were yours and we had a license to them while the service was running.” In other words, everything is gone now, so unless you saved your files before the retirement, there’s no way to get them back.
“Photosynth changed the way some of us went about capturing a memorable place. It was a unique way to document a location in a moment, and perhaps no moment ever surpassed the one we shared with the world in January 2008,” Microsoft says.
Photosynth was launched in August 2008 by Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Michigan, who contributed to the project with Photo Tourism, its own research that focused on analyzing photos and stitching them together to create panoramic imagines.
The service has gradually improved with new features, including support for Gigapixel panoramas, which was added by Microsoft in March 2010. The number of users, however, started to decline in the last few years, and with Microsoft transitioning parts of the service to other products, it didn’t make much sense for the company to keep it alive.