Hugin is purely and simply unusable for panorama stiching

[Hugues D]

Hi,

I just downloaded and installed Hugin. I then loaded 15 pictures I have stiched very easily with the free Microsoft ICE giving great results but some stiching errors. I thought that Hugin would be a better tool. Conclusion : Hugin is not even capable of finding two common points between 2 pictures in my set of 15.

This is ridiculous and unusable.

[Carlos Eduardo G. Carvalho (Cartola)]

Or you don't know how to use it :)

Carlos E G Carvalho (Cartola)
http://cartola.org/360
http://www.panoforum.com.br/

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[Bart van Andel]

That's weird. I can stitch whatever I want with this same Hugin program and the results usually come out pretty nicely. Must be me doing something wrong?

[Carlos Eduardo G. Carvalho (Cartola)]

Surely.

And the main wrong thing we can see is that instead of asking how to do and tell what and how he has done, so we could help, he has just made useless comments. Looks like a user that deserves the good and old RTFM answer.

I have stitched hundreds of panoramas with Hugin, but surely other stitchers also work. Just let him buy his proffered one or maybe do some piracy crime.

Cheers,

Carlos E G Carvalho (Cartola)
http://cartola.org/360
http://www.panoforum.com.br/

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[Harry van der Wolf]

This is probably a classical situation where "the computer problem" is between the monitor and the back of the chair.

Harry

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hugin-ptx/CALW1f7jfpT2A0xF4Fmz14vc0ZcyhqFv-C5yOyyt1O-KYPxGtjg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Carl von Einem]

Don't be a troll, if you want help then describe what went wrong - or
leave. We can digest your .pto, screenshots and a detailed description
instead of a silly "conclusion".

At this stage, your message is ridiculous and unusable. Your own words
fit somehow :-)

Hugues D schrieb am 24.03.14 18:08:

[kfj]

On Monday, March 24, 2014 6:08:34 PM UTC+1, Hugues D wrote:

Thanks for sharing. You show your's, so I'll show mine

http://www.360cities.net/profile/kfj

Kay

[Paperaussie]

Hugues, if you want really great panoramas without stitching errors you should give this a bit more time. Hugin has a great deal of features which makes it more difficult to use but also opens up a whole world of features that you will not find in MS ICE. Spend a bit more time on understanding the workflow in Hugin and I trust the final output will be far superior to MS ICE.

[Joergen Geerds]

While Hugues comment is indeed over the top, and in its actual content not helpful to provide any help, there is fundamental truth in his sentiment.

The beginning hurdle for me as an end user is finding a downloadable binary, since http://hugin.sourceforge.net is the official homepage, but not maintained since last year. it takes some serious looking around to find a recent binary. I do this process about every 6-9 months, and in the past it was always the same result: i couldn't use it (and this could be very much a PEBKAC). I finally found a mac 2014.0rc2 version, installed it, launched it, and get confronted with wxwidget error messages... not a good start again. then I load a bunch of small fisheye tiffs (no exif data), load them, and get asked to enter exif data for each of the 18 tiffs, one by one (my mind hovers again next to the "should I just delete it again and come back in 6 months?")... being confronted with more wx errors, and no way to assign the same lens parameters to all source images (at least not in a obvious way), I am going to give up today, since no control points could be found, and maybe try again tomorrow. as it stands right now, I have never in my whole pano life managed to get a single panorama out of hugin, and I really tried (please don't bash me as a pano beginner). I could maybe try harder to get around the quirks hugin is throwing my may, and every time I install a new hugin I really want to believe that this is the one that finally works, it is not the easiest task for users like me.

so while Hugues comment is wrong from a bug fixing perspective, there is enough truth to his sentiment to not bash it like it was.

[Terry Duell]

Hello Joergen,

On Sun, 11 May 2014 01:13:13 +1000, Joergen Geerds <jge...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> While Hugues comment is indeed over the top, and in its actual content
> not helpful to provide any help, there is fundamental truth in his
> sentiment.
> The beginning hurdle for me as an end user is finding a downloadable
> binary, since http://hugin.sourceforge.net is the official homepage, but
> not maintained since last year. it takes some serious looking around to
> find a recent binary.

The sourceforge site provides a link to a Mac package for the current
release (2013.0.0). The site isn't really unmaintained, just that there
hasn't been a later release.
Do you have problems with hugin-2013.0.0.

Cheers,
--
Regards,
Terry Duell

[Jeff W]

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Joergen here.

Hugues comment wasn't terribly constructive, but that doesn't change the reality that Hugin has some significant issues compared to its competitors. CPFind and Nona are both painfully slow, and both Enblend and Enfuse frequently crash for me on multiple computers, at least two of which have 12GB of ram. Hugin's HDR_Merge output can sometimes produce nice results, but in my experience that happens perhaps 2 out of every 5 times, and the other three border on unusable. Add in random crashes of Hugin itself, and occasional serious bugs (which do generally get fixed, but there are always new ones to take their place), and I have a really difficult time recommending Hugin for anyone who is planning to take a lot of panoramas, or someone who is planning to take a particularly complicated project. I've gotten some nice results out of Hugin, but it's always felt like I'm fighting with the software... and frankly the time and frustration are worth the price of the other packages out there, at least for me. 

I've stitched dozens of panoramas in most of the major packages on the market. I keep Hugin installed because occasionally it's useful, but I don't think it's unfair to say that it is the least polished and most cantankerous stitching program out there. Of course, it's also the free-est stitching program out there, and in some sense you get what you pay for, in this case. 

I could live with the slowness, probably, if I had a high confidence that Hugin/Enblend/Enfuse/Nona/Hdr_merge would actually *work* without crashing on my project, and deliver acceptable results. Just for the heck of it, I pulled up one of my most recent panoramas in 2014.RC1 (Windows) to see if I could get it to stitch: "C:\Program: Interrupt/Exception caught (code = 0xc0000005, addr = 0x00007FF6DF9CC15F)" 

So there's that.

It's clear, based on reviews, that I may be in the minority. Maybe the things I'm trying to do just aren't that common, but I've had very bad luck getting Hugin to consistently work on my projects. 

I've really wanted to like Hugin. But in the end, I haven't.

[Carlos Eduardo G. Carvalho (Cartola)]

Well,

I just like hugin, maybe because I am a big fan of opensource software and as a system analyst I surely have less problems with complex software than a standard user. And here we are talking about photographers, that many times have very few computer abilities. What I am trying to say is that I surely see reason in those comments and it doesn't mean that I don't see all the merit and effort made by developers, that do this for fun, for free or whatever, as volunteers.

I surely see more hugin crashes on Windows and it surely contributes a lot for hugin being less used, as I see windows as the biggest player in the market share, at least here in Brazil, but have some feeling that worldwide it is also the same.

I have done some workshops using both windows and linux. On Linux I don't remember having crashes or any other problems, but on Windows, which is only an option when the lab can't install Linux, I have already told people to leave their computers and follow the workshop on a friends desktop, cause there were nothing else we could do in the middle of the class.

Maybe we should focus a little bit more on windows versions to stabilize it. Don't know if there are windows developers motivated for it.

I also see some effort to change its usability, and recent changes on the interface show it, but I still see difficulties on new users to use it. They usually prefer, as Jeff and others said, commercial softwares, like PTGui. I think PTGui user interface is quite similar to Hugin, but I have already seen some users preferring it...

Bests,

Carlos E G Carvalho (Cartola)
http://cartola.org/360
http://www.panoforum.com.br/

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hugin-ptx/6d88eba1-accd-41ed-b167-187cd8739635%40googlegroups.com.

[David W. Jones]

I think in some cases the Windows bug issues appear to be coming from
Windows components or libraries that aren't part of Hugin?

Also, MS is methodically stripping OpenGL support from Windows, because
they want to lock everyone into using their proprietary API instead.
That impacts Hugin.

We haven't used Windows at home for over 10 years now. (I use it at the
office but don't do any graphics work there.)

The Hugin UI is very logical when you understand the theoretical
framework underlying mapping images and stitching. The UI is also
somewhere in the middle of transformation, not necessarily in a
direction I agree with. So it can be a bit confusing.

Personally, if someone wants to make panoramas with just a click or two,
it sounds like they're members of the casual smartphone/tablet/P&S
camera world. And while it could be nice to have a "Hugin Lite" (a
reworked Assistant UI) for such, I certainly hope Hugin doesn't lower
its power to accommodate such people.

> <mailto:jeff.wis...@gmail.com>>:

> /very/ bad luck getting Hugin to consistently work on my projects.

>
> I've really wanted to like Hugin. But in the end, I haven't.
>
> On Saturday, May 10, 2014 11:13:13 AM UTC-4, Joergen Geerds wrote:
>
> While Hugues comment is indeed over the top, and in its actual
> content not helpful to provide any help, there is fundamental
> truth in his sentiment.
> The beginning hurdle for me as an end user is finding a

> downloadable binary, since http://hugin.__sourceforge.net

David W. Jones
gnome...@gmail.com
wandering the landscape of god
http://dancingtreefrog.com

[Jeff W]

Cartola - 

Like you, I agree that Hugin's developers should be thanked and more appreciated than they are. I think this is why Hugues' original comment touched a nerve with some people - it was an attack on developers who, generally speaking, do this for fun and for free, and there was a certain lack of understanding in his post, which rubbed people the wrong way, and rightly so. Whatever Hugin's shortcomings, it is free, and available, and for many people that may be the difference between creating stitched images or not. For people who can't afford the commercial alternatives, it is nice to have some alternative to recommend, even if that alternative is not perfect.

I would be thrilled if Hugin could accomplish everything I needed it to for free, and if it could, I would recommend it to anyone in a heartbeat. 

Unfortunately, in my experience, it does not, and I cannot.

GnomeNomad (David) - 

I agree that the UI is not particularly complicated or complex, especially if you understand the general principles behind stitching. There are a few odd choices here and there, and some power functionality is not as easy to access as it should be, but overall, I would call Hugin's UI a fairly good open-source clone of PTGui.

I can't speak for everyone, of course, but my stability issues with the Windows build haven't really been with the UI (where OpenGL would be the culprit), but rather crashes of component programs (Enblend and Enfuse commonly give me out of memory errors, even when plenty of memory is free, and I've had Nona and HDR_merge crash on multiple occasions for no obvious reason). My suspicion is that there are probably some issues with the libraries that these programs link to (or more technically the Windows ports of the libraries), but given that I often debug software at work, I have very little interest in doing so when I get home. I have used the Linux version, on occasion, and found it to be more stable, as Cartola mentioned. At the same time, I have also encountered some weird bugs there as well (issues like excessive disk access, etc.). 

With regard to your "make panoramas with just a click or two smartphone/p&s" comment, I don't consider myself to fall into that category. The majority of panoramas I stitch are multirow and stacked HDR sets, with generally 60-150 component images. I appreciate having as much power under the hood as possible, which is why several of my projects ultimately end up in PTAssembler - the ability to specify your own projection can often be the difference between your shot working out or not - a feature, I might mention, which Hugin does not have (nor does PTGui, in fairness).

My biggest issue with Hugin, however, is a general "can I trust it to work?" concern. After trying to stitch a couple of dozen image sets in several packages to get a feel for which package is "best" (note: I don't think any of them are), I have very little confidence that Hugin is going to give me a successful stitch with a reasonable amount of effort, in a reasonable amount of time (see below), on a consistent basis. As I said before, I don't consider the "one-click" output from any package to be sufficient, but neither do I consider it acceptable for the blender/fusion/HDR engine to crash or give a blank output on 30-40% of the projects I attempt. True, I can use a different blender and do the fusion/HDR merge in a third-party program, but it seems a little unfair to give Hugin the credit for "creating my panorama" when I had to use other, non-supplied (and definitely not open-source) tools to get the project done. 

That might all be forgivable, of course, if Hugin's performance, either in terms of processing time or final output quality were heads and shoulders above the competition. Unfortunately, they are not.

This morning, after Cartola posted, I thought it might be interesting to do a speed comparison between a few packages in terms of how long it took to put a panorama together, and how long it took to render it. I selected a recent project with 90 images, 18 stacks of 5 exposures. The three packages I had installed on my system were PTGui, PTAssembler, and Hugin. For each project, I initially did a "Load Images" and "Align" or "Auto-Create," which seemed to me to be a reasonable procedure that a typical person might take, at least as a starting point. The projects were run on the same computer (Core i5 Haswell laptop, SSD, 12GB RAM) with no other activity taking place while the various tasks were performed. Timing was performed by me, with a stopwatch, meaning there may be a second or two error in the times, but as you'll see below, we're not exactly talking about a photo finish. 

PTGui was, not surprisingly, the fastest, taking only 1:21 to generate control points, and 0:32 to align the panorama. PTAssembler was considerably slower, taking 12:40 to generate control points, and 1:51 to optimize and align the panorama. Hugin, on the other hand, took 17:48 to generate control points. The next step, celeste, took 6:55. The next step in the "assistant" is cpclean, which I eventually stopped after 3 hours, because honestly it seemed stupid to let it continue after that long. 

It's worth pausing here to emphasize this point: PTGui had a reasonably well aligned panorama in just under two minutes. PTAssembler took almost 15 minutes. Hugin was still mucking about with control points and trying to align the panorama three and a half hours later using the automated "align" functionality - and it wasn't finished when i cancelled it.

After cancelling the assistant, I decided to see if I could back out and run the manual optimizer with the control points generated during the "align" step. It completed, but the resulting panorama was garbage. Clearly, there were some control point errors. Lots of them, actually. Fine, let's start over, go full manual. Load images. Generate control points using the multirow/stacked setting. CPfind completed in 17:48, almost 5 minutes (40%) slower than PTAssembler and 13x (1300%)! slower than PTGui. Geometric optimization took 6:31 to align the panorama, or 3.5x slower than PTAssembler, and 12x slower than PTGui. Thankfully, however, we at least had reasonable control points and a somewhat aligned panorama though, in fairness, one that needed a little more TLC than the other two before it was presentable. 

Rendering provided a similar story: Rendering with a Spline16 interpolator, PTGui completed in 11:05. PTAssembler took 17:46. Hugin completed... oh, wait, did I mention that hdr_merge crashes a lot in Windows? Yes, this would be one of those times. But never mind that, we have Linux! 

Booting into Linux (Ubuntu 14.04, default Hugin install from package manager), I fired up the project. Everything did eventually render, but only after 2:25:01.

Again, it's worth pausing to reiterate just how slow Hugin was for this project: PTGui finished the whole thing, input images to final panorama in under 15 minutes. Hugin took almost three hours (over six, if you count the first 3.5 wasted hours from the "Align" debacle), didn't finish the project at all in Windows (a supposedly supported operating system), and in my personal opinion the output doesn't look as good.

As I mentioned in my first post, you do get what you pay for, and in this case, I suppose for the difference in price, many people could live with the slow performance, if that were the only problem. Unfortunately, again, in my experience, slow performance is not the only problem - particularly in Windows, Hugin is also beset with crashes, bugs, and general failure to generate a good alignment without a reasonable amount of handholding and understanding of the underlying phenomena. 

If you're an expert who has a good understanding of the math behind image stitching, you'll probably not have a problem understanding Hugin. If you're a software developer who is capable of debugging Hugin's various crashes and shortcomings, you might be happy you didn't have to pay for a more expensive package. If you run Linux only, you'll be glad there is some option available to you. If you have the patience of Job, you won't mind waiting for Hugin to finally produce an output (though you may be as old as Methuselah by the time it finishes...).  

Hugin's best quality is that it's free. I appreciate that the developers have put the time and effort into Hugin to make it as workable of an alternative as it is. You can, with a lot of work, get good results out of it, at least for some projects. But back to Joergen's post, just because the OP wasn't terribly helpful doesn't mean there wasn't some amount of truth to his criticisms. Telling people who've had problems with Hugin (or who don't think it is as good as the alternatives) that they "just don't know how to use it," or that they are "members of the casual smartphone/tablet/P&S camera world" or that they "have very few computer abilities," or that they should be using Linux, or that the problem is (entirely) "between the monitor and the back of the chair" is not a valid defense of Hugin. I have a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and work at a Tier I research university... and I firmly believe that using a piece of software - even a piece of open source software - shouldn't require either of those things. 

I'm glad that many of you find Hugin suitable for your needs. Every year or so, I install the new version, play around with it, and conclude that it's still not worth using as a daily driver - at least not for me. There are too many rough edges, too many crashes, and too much inconsistency in the output for me to rely on it, even though I'm no longer doing professional photography work. YMMV, of course. Personally, I'm happy to pay for the faster, more powerful, and more consistent alternatives.

Best

Jeff

[boomslang]

After reading some of the comments in this thread, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the Hugin contributers for their work. I am very content with the software and I am often impressed by the output it produces. Even on my fairly old computer with limited resources (about 1 GB of free RAM), I am able to stitch panoramas consisting of 35 photos without real problems. In fact I can't recall any crashes. For me, Hugin is pretty stable.

My system information is displayed below. This year I switched to Windows 7; before that I used XP on which Hugin showed a similar stability.

I did notice though, that since version 2013 the control point detector gives a larger number of false control points, which can cause the optimiser to come up with wrong parameters. Not sure if this is somehow because of wrong default control point detector settings.

Thanks again and greetings from a happy user!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Operating System: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 64-bit edition
Architecture: 64 bit
Free memory: 1910476 kiB
Active Codepage: 1252 (Western European Windows)

Hugin
Version: 2013.0.0.0d404a7088e6 built by Matthew Petroff
Path to resources: C:\Program Files\Hugin/share/hugin/xrc/
Path to data: C:\Program Files\Hugin/share/hugin/data/
Path to public lensfun database: C:\Program Files\Hugin/share/lensfun

[Henk Keijzer]

I too would like to thank the developers for their work. The tool has its quirks but it performs well for the purposes I use it for. 

One feature request though: PTEditor extract / insert view functionality please (PTEditor does not work for pictures bigger then 10000x5000)

Best regards,

Henk

[David W. Jones]

On 05/14/2014 06:22 PM, Jeff W wrote:
> I have a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer
> Engineering and work at a Tier I research university...

You have lots of knowledge in a narrow specialty.

> and I firmly
> believe that using a piece of software - even a piece of open source
> software - shouldn't require either of those things.

I think that might depend on the software ... There are statistical
analysis packages out there that most certainly require extensive
education in statistics to be used with any degree of correctness.

I bet if someone handed each of us software for designing a microchip,
you could sit right down and get to work, while I'd still trying to
figure how to get started.

I've looked at some dedicated software for producing HDR images. They
ALL require a very good knowledge of the theory and algorithms involved.

The smartphone/tablet/P&S camera crowd expect their software to do
*everything* for them, even guide them in taking each component shot so
it already starts out aligned to a great extent. They not only don't
know a thing about how it happens, they don't WANT to know and would
only whine about all that extra stuff they don't need. The principle of
"Make it Just Work" in action.

[David W. Jones]

I once stitched a very large (~115 6Mpix 48-bit frames) panorama where I
shot each frame simply by resting my camera on the rail of the ferry I
was on and shooting as the ferry proceeded into port. The final stitched
TIFF came in at 768MB. Not everything aligned properly - after all, the
ferry made a few turns as it chugged into port. But lengthy chunks of it
were quite good.

I did it using a 1.8GHz Celeron processor (single core) with 2GB of RAM,
running whatever version of Hugin I had back then on Debian Sid Linux.
It took the poor little machine about 8 hours to do it. No crashes. Lots
of disk activity, I'm sure the swap partition was getting hammered and
probably contributed a lot to the slowness.

The main cause of crashes I've had with Hugin have been the OpenGL
preview, which seems to be very sensitive to changes in OpenGL libraries.

I'm quite happy with Hugin despite the UI going the wrong direction.

On 05/14/2014 02:16 PM, 'boomslang' via hugin and other free panoramic

[Jeff W]

Henk / Boomslang - 

Hear hear!

David - 

On Thursday, May 15, 2014 3:39:52 AM UTC-4, GnomeNomad wrote:

You have lots of knowledge in a narrow specialty.

And yet my grandmother, to the day she died, swore I was going to electrocute myself when changing a lightbulb if the switch was still on.

But in all seriousness, how many other ways are you going to find to call people stupid and inadequate in this thread? 

The only reason I've entered this discussion at all is that following Hugues' admittedly not-terribly-helpful post, the universal response from the community was what we might call the Apple playbook: blame the user. You didn't take time to get to know the software. You must not understand what's going on. You're holding it wrong. You're not computer savvy enough. You are just part of the point and shoot crowd that wants a one click solution. You should be using Linux instead of Windoze. Etc.

Joergen's point, and mine as well, is that you can have a very good knowledge of what's going on under the hood, be very proficient technologically and photographically, and still have a difficult time getting good results with Hugin. It crashes far too often. It produces outputs with black patches where image stacks should be (even in Linux). It gets stuck in an optimization loop for 3 hours. And the like. These are not problems with the user; they are problems with the program. 

And yes, as I have already said, maybe I am using the program in ways that the average user doesn't - but I'm using it for functionality it claims to have, and I'm using it to try to stitch the types of panoramas I want to shoot. Is your next move to say I should be shooting non-stacked, non-HDR images?

 

I think that might depend on the software ... There are statistical
analysis packages out there that most certainly require extensive
education in statistics to be used with any degree of correctness.

I'm going to be pedantic and push back here a bit. I agree that the "average person" might have a hard time finding some legitimate reason to use or need to use a package like R or Matlab. But in terms of actually using the software to accomplish a specific task they are set (say, loading and displaying a TIF file in Matlab), my general belief is that most people, even those without a great deal of technical knowledge, could follow a fairly simple tutorial. I would agree that it requires some technical skill to, for instance, receive a problem like "find the frequency spectrum of this dataset" and then go generate the code to solve the problem in a computational software package. But at that point we aren't talking about using the software, but rather possessing the knowledge to solve a problem. 

If we want to use your analogy, we might consider a Matlab clones like Octave for Freemat, and compare them to Hugin. In the context of this thread, it would be like Octave crashing on 20% of the Matlab scripts I ran (both claim "close to 100% Matlab code compatibility), or if a subset of the matrix functions in Freemat produced matrices with all zeros, instead of the correct results. In such a case, it wouldn't be my input scripts or the technical skill of the user (except possibly to be able to identify the problems), it would be the program itself which was to blame. 

And so is the case here - if an even somewhat skilled user is able to, in relatively short order, produce an acceptable panorama from a set of images in two other packages, and has a large amount of difficulty producing any panorama at all in Hugin, then at some point it seems reasonable to conclude that it might not be a problem with the user, and it might not be a problem with the images; it might be a shortcoming of the software. 

Again, the developers deserve to be thanked for the work they do. Their efforts make computational photography possible for a group of people who otherwise wouldn't have access to it. At the same time, users should not be blamed when they can't get Hugin to work, or experience bugs, crashes, and strange output. Hugin seems to work well for many people, but it certainly is not perfect. Pretending that it is doesn't serve anyone's interests.

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

Jeff W writes:

> [...]

>
> The only reason I've entered this discussion at all is that
> following Hugues' admittedly not-terribly-helpful post, the
> universal response from the community was what we might call the
> Apple playbook: blame the user.

I agree with you fully. While my first truely successful panorama
using Hugin is yet to come, I'm optimistic that I will reach that
goal. But my primary motivations are my very intensive play
instinct (I'm a researcher, too) and my strong belief in free
software. If I was pragmetic, wanting Getting Things Done, I'd use
other tools. That's okay -- Hugin has it's niche, and for many
including me, it is an important one.

Critisising a FLOSS program should never be answered with "you're
ungrateful" or "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" or "implement
it yourself, it's open source". This leads to nowhere. A proper
answer is disputing the argument per se, or pointing to lack of
manpower.

Tschö,
Torsten.

--
Torsten Bronger Jabber ID: torsten...@jabber.rwth-aachen.de
or http://bronger-jmp.appspot.com

[Bart van Andel]

Jeff,

On Thursday, May 15, 2014 2:12:34 PM UTC+2, Jeff W wrote:

The only reason I've entered this discussion at all is that following Hugues' admittedly not-terribly-helpful post, the universal response from the community was what we might call the Apple playbook: blame the user. You didn't take time to get to know the software. You must not understand what's going on. You're holding it wrong. You're not computer savvy enough. You are just part of the point and shoot crowd that wants a one click solution. You should be using Linux instead of Windoze. Etc.

By "universal response" I assume you are referring to the responses in this specific thread, which started by a rather hostile message basically calling crap on everything Hugin is about. That's arguably not the best way to get any help at all.

There are numerous threads pointing out various (far too many) problems of Hugin on various kinds of systems. Most of them were written in a much more relaxed tone, resulting in a completely different kind of discussion from the one in this here thread. You'll agree with me that nice questions deserve nice answers, whereas questions asked like the developers produced nothing but an executable pile of steaming shit deserve to be flushed down the toilet, or at the very least may expect some "less subtle" responses.

Consider this example. You are helping out in a shop which gives away refurbished electronics equipment to people who cannot afford it. Of course you are doing this without compensation, and only if you have spare time left after your busy everyday job and other activities. Someone enters the shop, carrying with him a faulty hard drive. Which complaint would you prefer:

- "This hard drive is utter shit, I tried to connect it to my computer once and it didn't work!", or

- "Something is wrong with this device, my computer does not recognize it somehow. The light is blinking and the drive seems to be spinning, but no matter what USB port I try, my OS cannot see it."

I guess the answer is obvious. Maybe you'd still try to help out a rude customer, but with a lot less willingness than when helping a polite customer.

I agree with you however that Hugin severely lacks in stability and speed, and that the UI and workflow could use improvement. Long time user here, not very happy yet with the current state of the (new) UI, but I know enough about the program to work around most annoyances most of the time. However, considering almost everything is done in the spare time of a pretty diverse group of contributors, without an architecture overseeing things or a lot of code review, I don't think it's a bad product at all. Supporting the subtleties of several different kinds of OS (Linux, iOS, Windows, all in several flavors) isn't a straightforward task. Many libraries are involved, some of which require (or have required in the past) adaptation specific for Hugin. Not an easy thing to maintain.

In the end, it's a complex product, far from perfect, but still a hell of an accomplishment. And I'm usually very happy with the results it produces, especially considering I shoot almost everything hand-held with auto exposure.

--

Bart

[Jeff W]

rBart - 

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I was referring to the replies in this thread, most of which sounded something like, "I don't have a problem getting it to work, sounds like you are a moron." Even if the OP wasn't at all tactful, there's still at least a reasonable chance that he wasn't the problem here. Effectively calling someone stupid because you don't like what they said isn't terribly constructive, as Torsten noted. If nothing else, it's a way of calling everyone who can't figure out how to get Hugin to work, whether like Hugues or not, stupid. 

Aside from that, I completely agree. Not perfect, but surprising it works as well as it does. Maintaining it is a challenge. And as I've said in every post now, the developers should be respected and appreciated. Here's to hoping 2014 is better than 2013. 

[Joergen Geerds]

Jeff,

Thank you for supporting my point.

There are parts of the hugin project that I deeply love, and couldn't live without: Enfuse (via using Ingmar Bergmark's slightly outdated enfuseGUI). it is awesome, it is fabulous, and I would shower the author with money.

But my personal experience in this group has been very consistent over the year: getting blamed for not understanding, and being too stupid to use it. I classify myself as a PTgui expert, being the #5 supporter/poster in the PTgui google group, advanced user of APG, global expert for stitching 360 video (alpha tester for AVP and VS), and classifying me as the point&shoot, click&stitch person couldn't be further from the truth, but I get rolled into that group in the blink of an eye, just for saying "wouldn't it be nice if hugin would work as advertised?"

Would I love to tell my customers that they can reliably try using hugin with video-stitch? yes, I would, but I can't, because as I said, I have not managed to get a single pano out of hugin, ever. so my recommendation is: "go and try hugin, if you are getting it to work, you are a better user than me", if not, buy a ptgui license, and don't worry, it works 100%.

There is so much potential within hugin, but somehow it feels like there is a captain missing at the helm, and the MS Hugin is floating aimlessly in the sea of panoramas. and every time somebody mentions there is a leak in the ship, a guest on board, or a crew mates comes up and tells us "you're doing it wrong, stupid". The MS hugin has also an open door policy: if you don't like it, don't use it.

As Jeff said, I will look how the MS hugin is doing in 6 months. I hope she finds her way.

[David W. Jones]

Well, I certainly can't help anyone with the Windows versions.

Hugin works for me.

I don't make money from doing panos, so cannot spend money for making them.

My recollection of my first thought about the original post: "They're
not looking for help, they're just a Microsoft troll."

As far as I know, the original poster has never once responded to
anyone's responses to their post, which just furthers my belief that
they weren't looking for help at all. They were just trolling.

I hope they're happy with their MS pano product, whatever it was.

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

David W. Jones writes:

> [...]

>
> My recollection of my first thought about the original post:
> "They're not looking for help, they're just a Microsoft troll."
>
> As far as I know, the original poster has never once responded to
> anyone's responses to their post, which just furthers my belief
> that they weren't looking for help at all. They were just
> trolling.

Maybe. But the rest of the thread contained so much well-disposed
and constructive critisism that this doesn't matter anymore.

[David W. Jones]

On 05/15/2014 08:15 PM, Torsten Bronger wrote:
> Hallöchen!
>
> David W. Jones writes:
>
>> [...]
>>
>> My recollection of my first thought about the original post:
>> "They're not looking for help, they're just a Microsoft troll."
>>
>> As far as I know, the original poster has never once responded to
>> anyone's responses to their post, which just furthers my belief
>> that they weren't looking for help at all. They were just
>> trolling.
>
> Maybe. But the rest of the thread contained so much well-disposed
> and constructive critisism that this doesn't matter anymore.

From my experience as a technology trainer, training users ranging from
secretaries to directors of academic presses on web development, I'm
firmly convinced that anyone can be trained to do anything.

But only if they're willing to learn. The only stupid user is the one
who refuses to learn.

[Erik Krause]

Am 16.05.2014 03:44, schrieb Joergen Geerds:
> But my personal experience in this group has been very consistent over
> the year: getting blamed for not understanding, and being too stupid to
> use it. I classify myself as a PTgui expert, being the #5
> supporter/poster in the PTgui google group, advanced user of APG, global
> expert for stitching 360 video (alpha tester for AVP and VS), and
> classifying me as the point&shoot, click&stitch person couldn't be
> further from the truth, but I get rolled into that group in the blink of
> an eye, just for saying "wouldn't it be nice if hugin would work as
> advertised?"

I'd like to support Joergen's point. I have experienced exactly the same
(and worse). As a consequence I withdrew most of my activity from this
group, although I was a supporter since more than 10 years ago.

It's a pity: So much potential, especially in enfuse, which could have
been a major breakthrough in photography going far beyond panorama
stitching. This chance is gone, the commercials have taken over...

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de

[Harry van der Wolf]

Well, I could start with saying that "it works for me" as it really does. I'm on Linux.

2014-05-16 8:30 GMT+02:00 David W. Jones <gnome...@gmail.com>:

But only if they're willing to learn. The only stupid user is the one who refuses to learn.

A system that crashes on you is not a good system, no matter whether you are trained or not (and I have also trained a lot of users and have also followed a lot of trainings). The fact that Hugin does a nice job on Linux doesn't change the fact that it presumably isn't functioning correcty on windows.

To comment on my own "it works for me": This is the most annoying answer a "help desk" can give when someone whith a problem  asks for assistance.
And to refer to ITIL: if one person has an issue it is an incident. If many users have an issue it is a problem. I'm afraid we have a problem.

I hope we can correct this in the 2014.0 or perhaps a 2014.1 version as we might need to focus on stability first.

Harry

[boomslang]

Dear hugin developers,


As a full reboot of my Windows PC takes > 10 minutes I always set my computer to hybernate instead of shutting it down. Therefore, I would like to see an option 'Hybernate when done' in the Batch processor.


Thanks for all your work!

[Erik Krause]

Am 17.05.2014 15:11, schrieb 'boomslang' via hugin and other free
panoramic software:

> As a full reboot of my Windows PC takes > 10 minutes I always set my
> computer to hybernate instead of shutting it down. Therefore, I would
> like to see an option 'Hybernate when done' in the Batch processor.

Until this happens you can use my shutdown-if-terminates batch file.
You'd need to modify the line number 34 using notepad (f.e.) and change
the -s to -h.
To use just pass it the name of the process as parameter and it will
shutdown 60 seconds after the process terminated.

-> http://tinyurl.com/ksauedf

[David W. Jones]

Hmmm, what's wrong with your Windows PC that it takes so long to reboot?
The Windows 7 PC I use at the office takes only 5 minutes to come up,
and that includes loading and running all the corporate-mandated
security/AV software (fully a third of the processes Task Manager shows
are such) and connected to half a dozen network shares.

[Bart van Andel]

On Saturday, May 17, 2014 12:28:38 PM UTC+2, Harry van der Wolf wrote:

Well, I could start with saying that "it works for me" as it really does. I'm on Linux.

[...]

To comment on my own "it works for me": This is the most annoying answer a "help desk" can give when someone whith a problem  asks for assistance.

I agree that it is an annoying answer, absolutely, and none that will help. The problem is, we are not a real help desk. We can neither stay on the phone and walk a user through a number of (standardized) steps, nor walk into their office and start troubleshooting for ourselves. Since we do not have access to other users' machines, troubleshooting is quite hard if the problem does not occur on your own machine.

Hugin mostly works for me too, apart from some (known) quirks (like make.exe crashes on 2014.0 RC1, if I remember it right), and I am not terribly familiar with the code base, nor do I have a build environment installed for Windows. If I were to work on Hugin, it would be on Linux most likely, simply because setting up a build environment is a whole lot easier there. In fact I regularly pull the sources and compile Hugin for Linux already. Things would be quite different if I were paid to support Hugin for Windows, but since I only have so much spare time (and other things and interests with more priority), I don't feel much of an urge to start hunting for hard-to-reproduce bugs (on my system anyway) on the Windows version of Hugin. A simple truth. Inconvenient for people who only want to use the software, not develop it, but it's simply how it works.

 

And to refer to ITIL: if one person has an issue it is an incident. If many users have an issue it is a problem. I'm afraid we have a problem.

Yes. But again, non-reproducibility and lack of installed build environment prevents me from diving into this.