MPO Viewer vs Parallaxly

A box of Keystone cards, a Fujifilm FinePix and a phone: MPO Viewer brings them together. It opens stereo photographs and stereo video straight from the camera, with no conversion and no computer, and lets you look at them the way they were meant to be seen. Through a viewer, with coloured glasses, or together on the television. A dual-lens camera such as the FinePix REAL 3D W1 or W3 writes every photograph to the card as an .mpo with both eyes inside it, and films in .avi. Point the app at a folder on your device or in iCloud Drive and they are all in one place, in a grid or a table, searchable. Keep them apart in as many folders as you like: each has its own captions, hidden photographs and playlists, and the name at the top of the grid switches between them. Six ways to look • Side by Side: the classic pair, for free viewing or a stereoscope, from a Holmes to an OWL • Crossed Eye: the same pair swapped, for anyone who crosses their eyes • Anaglyph: both eyes in one picture for coloured glasses, red/cyan, magenta/green, amber/blue or red/blue, with ghost reduction • Cardboard: the pair bent so the lenses of a cheap VR viewer straighten it out again; set it to your own viewer once • Wiggle: the two eyes flicker back and forth, on a timer or as you tilt the phone • Depth: a depth map built from the pair, moving along as you tilt Cardboard and Depth are marked experimental. Clips play with sound in the first four. Whichever you pick, the pair is put straight first: the eyes brought into line, the nearest thing placed at the screen plane. That is the difference between depth and a headache. Watching together A few red/cyan glasses and a television, and the whole room joins in. Mirror to an Apple TV or AirPlay screen, or plug in HDMI: the picture moves to the big screen and the phone becomes the remote. A strip of thumbnails under the photograph holds the whole folder, the one on the television in the middle: look ahead without the room noticing, and tap to send one over. Swipe through them or start a slideshow, which carries on from whatever you pick. Set the depth once per television and every photograph sits right on that screen from then on. Old cards A stereo card from 1900 becomes an MPO here like any other. Photograph one inside the frame the app draws, or hand it a scan to convert: it finds the two prints, straightens them, lays them on each other and takes out the colour cast. Every card then has three buttons of its own: turn it over, put the light back, or keep it without colour. And if you like, a model running on the device itself will colour it in. The card is never touched. A picture that already holds the pair side by side goes in the same way, and so does an anaglyph: that one the app takes back apart into its two views, in grey, the depth unchanged. Framing, keeping, sharing Put a photograph in a border in the colour you choose, or in one of six passepartouts, from a stereo card to a cardboard peep box, with a caption in a colour of its own. Save a selection as a playlist, in your order or shuffled. Side by Side, Crossed Eye and Anaglyph go out as PNG or JPEG, Wiggle as a GIF or a video, Depth as a tilt in MP4, and a clip as MP4 at three sizes. Exports carry a watermark; MPO Viewer Pro takes it off. And the rest A photograph you hide stays hidden, behind Face ID if you want. An info button tells you what the camera recorded, down to lens, aperture, shutter and ISO, with a map when there is a location. All of it works with VoiceOver and with the largest text sizes. With Reduce Motion on, Wiggle and Depth follow your tilt instead of moving by themselves, and those two also work with one eye. Your photographs do not leave your device. No accounts, no analytics, nothing looking over your shoulder. The one thing the app ever fetches is a larger colour model, and only when you ask for it. In English and Dutch. For anyone who finds a box of old stereo photographs again, and anyone who still makes them.

Turn the frames you already have into a wigglegram — an aligned, looping GIF or video where your subject stays still and the world around it rocks in 3D. Parallaxly starts from frames, not from the camera. Import a scan from a multi-lens film camera (the frames side by side on one strip), or 2 to 6 photos taken a small step apart. The app finds the frames, lines them up on your subject and plays the loop right away. • SPLITS YOUR SCAN — one scan with 2, 3 or 4 frames side by side is split automatically at the gaps between frames. Adjust any split line, or change the number of frames. • ALIGNS ON YOUR SUBJECT — tap the point that should stay still (or let the app pick one). Every frame is registered on that point to a fraction of a pixel, so the subject holds steady while the background and foreground move. Edges that aren't in every frame are cropped away, so the loop never shows an empty border. • EVENS OUT EXPOSURE — film frames scanned one by one differ in brightness and color. Match exposure brings every frame to the same look, so the loop doesn't flicker. • STRAIGHTENS HAND-HELD SHOTS — an optional correction for a small tilt between phone photos. • YOUR LOOP, YOUR WAY — back and forth (1-2-3-2-1) or a straight loop, speed from 40 to 400 ms per frame, and crops for posts and stories: original, 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16. Reorder or remove frames at any time. • GIF OR MP4 — a GIF that loops forever, or an H.264 video that repeats the loop for about 6 to 10 seconds, so it plays smoothly where videos don't loop on their own. Save to Photos or share. • PRIVATE — everything happens on your device. No account, no upload. Works with scans from multi-lens film cameras such as the Nishika N8000, Nimslo 3D and Reto3D, from any stereo pair, and with photos from your phone: take 2 or 3 shots of a subject, stepping a few centimeters sideways between them. What it doesn't do: it doesn't invent depth. You need at least two frames taken from slightly different positions; a single photo can't become a wigglegram here. Importing, aligning and the animated preview cost nothing. A one-time purchase unlocks exporting the GIF and MP4 files. Questions: overlapmarr@gmail.com