So you have taken some great new 360° photos with your new 360° camera. In today`s article we would like to present you with websites where you can share your 360° photos with other people.
More and more cameras are coming onto the market, such as the popular Ricoh Theta S and the new Nikon KeyMission 360, which allow you to take 360° photos and record videos quickly and inexpensively. The photos produced by these cameras are sometimes known as spherical panoramas, virtual tours or 360×180 images, providing a fun, virtual, realistic, interactive experience where the user can rotate, look up or down, zoom in and control where to look.
But sharing these 360° panoramas is not as easy as sending them by e-mail as an attachment or posting them on a website. If you try to do that, you will end up with a flat, distorted rectangular image like this:
Special software is required to make it interactive. But more and more social media sites and services are starting to support 360-degree photos and videos, and this is likely to increase as virtual reality headsets and applications become more popular. That`s why we`ve put together some of the best ways you can share 360-degree photos.
We`ll focus on 360-degree photos here, because the way you share 360-degree photos and videos is different. For example, YouTube is a great way to share 360 degree videos, but it doesn`t work with 360 degree photos. Some services here specialize in 360 degree photos, but cannot share 360 degree videos and self-hosting of 360 degree photos is more convenient than self-hosting of 360 degree videos.
There are also some services for sharing 360 degree photos that are device specific, like 360fly and the Samsung Gear 360.
Facebook is investing heavily in VR technology and has been supporting 360 degree photos and videos for sine time now. It`s one of the easiest and most widespread ways to share 360 degree photos as long as you want your visitors to visit the Facebook website to see them (they don`t work with the mobile Facebook applications).
How to Upload. Basically, you upload your 360 photo just like you would any other photo. You can then choose the starting point where the viewer first sees only the rotation and not the zoom.
Published version. If you publish it, it will appear on your own landing page and in the news feeds of others.
Embedding in other websites. Although you can embed 360-degree videos from Facebook into other websites, you can`t do it with 360-degree-images – it just comes out as a static, flat thumbnail.
Tips. The uploader should automatically recognize that it is a 360 degree photo. If not, you should check exactly two things. One is that the image has not been cropped or its aspects ratio changed – it should be an aspect ratio of 2:1, i.e. exactly twice as wide as it is high. The second is that you should check that you have not removed the metadata. If you upload directly from your phone or camera, this should not be a problem. However, if you are exporting an edited image from a project such as Lightroom, make sure you have the option to save metadata enabled. Facebook looks for the camera brand field to identify a known 360-degree camera, and if it doesn`t find it, it assumes it`s a normal flat image. If this information is missing, it is possible to add it manually (e.g. feed the metadata).
Kuula is relatively new website that has been developed specifically for the exchange of 360-degree panoramas. It is also one of the most elegant and simple options. There are both free and paid packages.
Metadata plays a less important role here and it works with an equilateral 2:1 image taken with any camera. You can set the starting position and apply photo filters to change the look. You can even generate a tiny planetary view if you want.
After uploading your spherical panorama as a JPG or PNG file, you can view it on the Kuula website with a smartphone, share it on social media, or embed it on other websites via iFrame. It is also ideal for viewing 360 degree content on Twitter.
Theta360.com
This is Ricoh`s proprietary service for supporting the theta cameras. It`s pretty simple, but it works.
And although it was developed for Ricoh cameras, you can publish panoramas that weren`t taken with the Rich Theta S or Ricoh Theta SC. They just have to be 2:1 panoramas of the same size, and it doesn`t matter whether you`ve removed the metadata or not. The result is an easy and quick way to share 360-degree photos, although you have relatively limited control over them.
Theta360.com is a web service, but you cannot upload images directly through a web browser. Instead, you have to use one of these two methods:
Embedding in other websites. Once you upload it to the Theta360.com service, you can view it on this website or embed it in your own website. If you embed it, you will get a branded Theta watermark that is not removeable.
360cities.net is specialized in 360 degree photos. It allows the sale and licensing of images and various options for embedding the panoramas in other websites.
If you are looking for a way to share 360 degree photos commercially, either by selling the images themselves or by offering flexible options for embedding the panoramas into client websites, they have most likely covered you. Many of the features require a subscription fee, but the free account is for non-commercial use. If you`re looking for ways to easily share your own panos, there are other good options that are less restrictive.
Memento360 is a new service that focuses specifically on sharing 360 degree panoramas. It is currently in the public beta phase.
It is free, but it lacks some basic features, such as generating code to embed the panorama in other pages. However, ther are some options for sharing social media, including Media. At the moment it`s pretty simple, but it will be interesting to see how the development progresses.
WordPress.com
WordPress recently announced that it will support the embedding of 360 degree images via shortcode in the near future.
Sounds like it will be integrated into the JetPack module for self-hosted WordPress pages in the coming weeks.
Hosting on your own website.
Some of these methods, such as the Theta360 service, allow you to embed the 360 degree photos on your own website and insert the necessary code to make them interactive. Other services like Facebook do not allow this.
But you can do this without third-party services. This is the easiest option and gives you the most control.
There are several ways to do this and it is generally not as easy as just uploading an equilateral image. Usually the process consists of two parts. First, the files must be prepared in something like Pano2VR. You need some kind of JavaScript/HTML5 on your website for the actual display. Older versions often used Flash (since renamed to Adobe Animate CC), but this technique is now very unpopular and in practice users are often confronted with compatibility problems. We would recommend that you use JavaScript/HTML5 options whenever possible.
WordPress plugins. If you use WordPress, there are some plugins that pack the code into a neat package and make it easy to install and work with. We recommend PanoPress. WP Photo Sphere is another popular option and if you edit your panoramas with Pano2VR, they have their own WordPress plugin that allows you to upload the ggpkg packages created by this app and then make the code available for viewing.
Google Street View.
If you are trying to share something that is very location specific, this option will advertise panoramas as street views in Google Maps. You can submit the images using the mobile Street View app, but there`s currently no way to upload them from a desktop.
Other options.
Panoramio.
Panoramio, one of the pioneers in sharing 360-degree photos of places, was abandoned in November 2016.
Supports 360 degree videos, but not 360 degree images. You can convert your panorama to a video file with animation and then upload it, but it is not interactive.
Twitter supports 360 degree video, but not native 360 degree images. However, you can use the third-party app Kuula to display 360-degree images as interactive panoramas directly on your feed.
Currently doesn`t support 360-degree images or video, but it sounds like they`re working on it. There are applications that can take a 360-degree photo, add animation, and then upload it as a video file, but it`s not interactive.
Imgur.
Does not support 360 degree photos or videos.
We hope we`ve been able to provide you with a good overview of such software. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
Thank you very much for your visit.