How to open a LAZ file online

Short answer: drag it into the free ViewerFX browser viewer. It decompresses and renders right in the tab, on your machine, with nothing uploaded anywhere. You can orbit the cloud, color it by elevation or intensity, and measure distances and spot elevations. No account, no install, no cost.

What a LAZ file is

LAZ is the compressed form of LAS, the standard lidar point cloud format. The compression, from the LASzip project, is lossless, so every point and attribute survives exactly, at roughly five to ten times smaller on disk. That is why data providers and survey crews prefer it for delivery: a 5GB LAS becomes a file you can actually move. State lidar portals, USGS downloads, drone processing exports and scanner deliverables all commonly arrive as LAZ.

The tradeoff is that even fewer everyday programs open LAZ than LAS. Your operating system has no idea what it is, and even some GIS tools want it converted first. Hence this page.

Three ways to open it

• Browser, right now: the free viewer decodes LAZ locally up to about 500MB. Since LAZ is compressed, that is a lot of points, often a full survey deliverable.
• Free desktop: CloudCompare opens LAZ and can convert, filter and edit. The right tool when you need to change the data, not just see it.
• Convert to LAS first: some older software only reads uncompressed LAS. CloudCompare or LAStools will convert, at the cost of disk space and a step.

Checking what you received

Opening a LAZ in the browser is the quickest sanity check on a delivery. You can see whether the coverage is complete, whether classification looks sane when you color by class, and whether elevations read correctly against known points. Doing that check the day the data arrives, while the crew or vendor still remembers the job, beats discovering a gap three weeks later.

When you need to send it onward

Forwarding a LAZ moves the problem to the next person, who now needs this page too. If the recipient is a client, an engineer or anyone who should not have to think about point cloud formats, turn the file into a link instead. A free ViewerFX account converts your upload to a streaming format automatically and gives you a share link that opens instantly in any browser, with measuring and annotations included and an optional password on the link. Free covers 2GB and two stored files, and paid plans take over when volume grows.