ETH Zurich / UNC Chapel Hill Structure-from-Motion and Multi-View Stereo pipeline with a GUI, CLI, and PyCOLMAP. Same job as Meshroom: photos in, sparse cameras plus dense mesh/point cloud out. The library is the "new BSD" license (BSD-3-Clause). COPYING.txt warns that building against COLMAP's dependencies "may affect the resulting COLMAP license." Pages fetched on 2026-08-24 do not assign a license to exported reconstructions. Your photos, and whatever they depict, stay outside the BSD grant.
At a glance
Licence
BSD-3-Clause
Commercial use
commercial OK
Credit
Not required
Status
active: License spot-checked at the source; the entry carries dated evidence.
Sample datasets on demuc.de are for tutorials. Do not treat them as a CC0 kit
Incremental SfM wants overlap. Phone bursts of a prop on a turntable work; random holiday folders usually do not
Learned features (ALIKED, LoMa) need ONNX at build time. Default is SIFT
Checklist: BSD text visible, commercial redistribution of the software permitted with notice, no NC/ND, not a marketplace, ETH/UNC named, not blocklisted, tool vs export ownership unquoted
Evidence
Live COPYING.txt (2026-08-24): "The COLMAP library is licensed under the new BSD license"
Same file (2026-08-24): "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted"
Same file (2026-08-24): "Building COLMAP with these dependencies may affect the resulting COLMAP license"