In short:
I strongly suggest making Cpfind accept filenames and wildcards to make it
usable for scripting.

Elaborated:

For the last few years I've been on-off working on a big panorama project
where over 60.000
individual images of mine are to be stitched into a couple of hundred
panormas for a virtual tour.
With this huge amount of material, a streamlined workflow becomes crucial.
I have developed a tightly slimmed workflow where I develop several
panoramas
in parallel through my processing pipeline. I work mostly in the command
prompt
through batch scripts and avoid the Hugin GUI for the most part.

My control point generator of choice has always been Alexandre Jenny's
great old Autopano 1.03,
which wins out over Autopano-SIFT in ease of use (Autopano-SIFT does not
interpret wildcards,
which makes usage a pain on Windows systems where the shell does not expand
them for me).

After upgrading my system, I've found that Autopano crashes on Windows 7
and I'm suddenly out of control point generator. The introduction of CPFind
in the Hugin package
is even worse from a batch-usage standpoint as it inconceivably expects a
complete
pre-made project file as input which would force me to handle every
panorama in the GUI.
As most of my images are preprocessed (including a stacking utility I
developed myself),
EXIF information is usually not preserved. This has never meant any trouble
as Autopano
doesn't need it anyway (thus I'd venture to say no control point generator
or panorama stitcher
should ever need it). Now having to manually add images and enter bogus
lens parameters
in Hugin to make CPFind work seems ridiculous.

I'd wholeheartedly suggest adding an alternative method of calling CPFind
by supplying images and making it process wildcards.

I'm currently unsure how to get past this setback. I guess until CPfind is
fixed,
either I'll have to adjust to using Autopano-SIFT (and spend most of my time
editing endless command lines of filenames), change to Linux or install
Windows XP
on a virtual machine just to get good old Autopano to work again.

Any suggestions?

Best regards
John Eklund, Sweden

On Jun 25, 10:47 am, John Eklund <jclo...@gmail.com> wrote:

i.e pto_gen -o fred.pto *.jpg
    cpfind -o output_project fred.pto

Cheers,
Terry

On 25 Jun 2012 06:39, "John Eklund" <jclo...@gmail.com> wrote:

cpfind doesn't take filenames on the command line in part because of
limitations if the Windows shell.

Hugin now has a tool called pto_gen for preparing the input files for
cpfind and autopano-sift-c: http://wiki.panotools.org/Pto_gen

This does take filenames as input. If you have problems with the command
line length, you can use pto_merge to do it in steps:
http://wiki.panotools.org/Pto_merge

--
Bruno

If you like you could also create a little batch script to create your
command line. The following script just creates a set of filenames based on
a wildcard. The wildcard has been hard coded here, but I assume you know a
bit about scripting already so you could easily modify this to your needs.

@echo off & setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

set wildcard=*
set files=

echo Generating a list of files using wildcard: %wildcard%

for %%f in (%wildcard%) do (
  rem For full path, use %%~ff
  rem For just filename and extension, use %%~nxf
  rem For plain use, use %%f

  set file=%%f

  rem Check for spaces and escape if necessary
  if not "!file!"=="!file: =_!" (
    set file="!file!"
  )

  rem Add file to our list of files
  set files=!files! !file!
)

echo Done.
echo.
echo List:
echo %files%
echo.

Good luck with your giant set of photos! What kind of your are we walking
about?

--
Bart

Yes the Windows shell seems to have a relatively narrow limitation on
command line length but if you interpret wildcards that limitation is
invisible for most users. (I'd be happy to contribute - I'm a programmer).
If nothing else maybe Hugin could include a batch script to call pto_gen
and cpfind, making it more straight-forward.

It still seems pto_gen needs an FOV number for non-EXIF files. I'm not
knowledgeable on the complex optic math but just pragmatically notice that
Autopano was fine without. :-) AFAIK that's something that can be deduced
at a later stage with control points in place? Supplying a number by hand
always makes me nervous about introducing errors if I make up an initial
number that's too far off reality. Can I be safe that it's still
recalculated just fine regardless what I supply it? How accurate do I have
to be?

/John

http://www.angkraftverket.se/panorama/

/John

--
Bart

--
Bruno

Wow. Quite a big project. And very nice images.
Nice work.
John

Thanks!