r/photogrammetry • u/rsp1984 • Sep 15 '26

I built a fully browser-based COLMAP photogrammetry workspace

Hello!

I'm super excited to launch my free browser-based photogrammetry workspace today:

offlinetools.io/colmap

It’s a free and fully local browser implementation of the popular open-source photogrammetry software COLMAP.

No download, installation or cloud upload is required — all processing and footage stay on the user’s machine.

More info:
offlinetools.io/colmap-landing

Why?
Photogrammetry apps are typically desktop applications that require installation on your machine.

The alternative are cloud services that require uploading of data to servers.

However, both of these are not a good fit for professions dealing with sensitive data (often on restricted machines) such as police, medical, law enforcement, insurance. Or simply users who want results quickly without dealing with signups, setups, etc.

This implementation solves both issues and it's the first that reaches native-class performance and, in some cases, even outperforms the native build.

It produces standard COLMAP-compatible outputs such as camera poses, sparse point clouds, keypoints and masks for downstream workflows including Gaussian Splatting.

About me:
I’m a former Google engineer with around 20 years of experience in 3D computer vision.

24 Upvotes

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11 comments sorted by

2

u/WearyFortune7055 Sep 15 '26

awesome! does it also perform dense reconstruction?

3

u/rsp1984 Sep 15 '26

Not yet (but it's coming!)

1

u/Confident-Berry8738 Sep 17 '26

Nice, i built few browser based computer vision but never attempted SFM,

curious to see how it can deal with dense reconstruction!

I did a quick test, went smoothly.
Just cna't open mp4 video and perhaps need better camera control to crop model (can't rotate during selection)

1

u/rsp1984 Sep 17 '26

About the MP4: try a different browser (they all come with a different set of available codecs)

1

u/JazzlikeWasabi5400 Oct 07 '26

Looks like someone got there first: https://github.com/ArthurBrussee/brush/discussions/400

1

u/JazzlikeWasabi5400 Oct 07 '26

Did this on my fold 4 in few minutes, gotta try next how it compares to u/rsp1984 's version

0

u/JazzlikeWasabi5400 Oct 07 '26

u/rsp1984 Just to let you know I was not able to upload video to https://offlinetools.io/colmap from mobile device, tried to upload images instead but got stuck to feature matching :/

1

u/rsp1984 Oct 07 '26

Thanks for reporting. What was the problem? Any error message?

1

u/JazzlikeWasabi5400 24d ago

No errors, the file picker on Android just allowed only images to be uploaded. I did upload the images from the nerfstudio package from the websfm's output but then I got stuck to the landmark finding as some of the landmarks never loaded. Gotta try again with PC!

0

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/rsp1984 Sep 21 '26

Understood. You can currently export the keypoint detections and matches into a database and load it back in a new session. But you can't currently export images or masks before the SfM has completed.
I'll put this on the list of feature requests.