Open a PLY file in your browser
View .ply scans, meshes and point clouds with their colours. Read on your own machine, never uploaded.
Drop your PLY file here
Runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and there is no sign-up.
How to open a PLY file online
- Drop your .ply file onto the viewer, or click to browse for it.
- The file is parsed on your own machine and rendered straight away.
- Explore it from any angle. On a phone, use the AR button to place it at real size.
What PLY stores
PLY, the Polygon File Format, came out of Stanford's 3D scanning work in the 1990s, and it is still what scanners write. A PLY has a short text header that lists what each point carries, then the points themselves: position, and often colour, normal and confidence. Faces are optional. That is why one PLY is a mesh and the next is a raw point cloud.
Phone scanning apps, structured-light scanners, photogrammetry tools like Meshroom and RealityCapture, and Gaussian splatting tools all write PLY.
From a scan to something you can use
- To print a scanned mesh, export it as STL from MeshLab or Blender, then run it through the STL repair tool. Scans almost always have holes.
- To show it on the web or in AR, convert it to GLB, which keeps the colour.
- A point cloud has no surface. It needs surface reconstruction, for example Poisson in MeshLab, before it can be printed.
Your file never leaves your browser
This tool is JavaScript running on your own machine. Your file is read into memory, processed there, and gone when you close the tab. It is never sent to us, so there is no upload, no queue, no retention period, and no account to create. You can disconnect from the network after the page loads and it will still work.
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Frequently asked
How do I open a PLY file?
Drop the .ply on this page. It opens in your browser with no install, as a mesh if the file has faces and as a point cloud if it only has points. Vertex colours from a scan are kept.
Does it open point clouds?
Yes. A PLY with vertices and no faces shows as a cloud of points, in the colours the scanner recorded. Very large clouds, tens of millions of points, can be too heavy for a phone.
Is my scan uploaded?
No. The file is read and rendered on your own machine. Nothing is sent to a server.
What units is a PLY in?
PLY does not record a unit. Scanners usually write millimetres or metres. Pick the unit from the menu under the viewer and check that the width, depth and height look right for the object you scanned.
Does it read binary and ASCII PLY?
Yes, both, including binary in either byte order.
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Last updated 2026-11-06