View and edit a 360° photo

What a 360° photo really is

A 360° photo is one ordinary-looking picture, twice as wide as it is high, in which the whole surroundings are unrolled like a world map: the left and right edges meet behind you, the top row is the sky straight above and the bottom row is the ground straight below. That flat layout is called equirectangular. A viewer wraps it back onto the inside of a sphere and you look around from its centre. What tells Facebook, Google and other viewers to do that is a small block of metadata inside the JPG — Google's GPano fields. Without it, the same photo shows up as a strange, stretched panorama.

Straighten the horizon and choose where the view starts

A camera held slightly crooked gives a horizon that waves up and down as you look around. Turn on the grid and nudge the two tilt sliders until the yellow horizon line lies on the real one; straightening turns the whole sphere, so every direction is corrected at once. Then look at the spot you want people to see first and set it as the start view: the photo is turned so that spot sits in the middle, which is where almost every 360° viewer begins. As long as you do not straighten, that turn moves whole columns of pixels, so the image itself loses nothing.

Faces and number plates

Before you share a 360° photo of a street, a shop or a showroom, the people and cars in it deserve the same care as in any other photo. Find faces looks around the whole sphere in many small views and covers every face it recognises with a mosaic; you can add an area anywhere with a click — a number plate, a name badge, a screen — and change its size. Detection is good but never perfect, and small faces in the distance are the easiest to miss, so look around once yourself before you save. The mosaic sits on the sphere itself, so it looks right from every angle, also in the little planet and the videos.

The nadir, the logo and your metadata

Straight down — the nadir — is where the tripod, the selfie stick or your own feet end up. Professionals usually cover it with a round logo, and so does the free export here: our logo sits in that spot. With a 360° plan, a day pass or credits you can leave the nadir clean or put your own logo there. Either way, the GPS location the camera stored in the file is removed, so the photo does not give away where it was taken; the camera make, model and date stay, and so does a name or copyright line you added yourself. If nothing about the pixels changes — no turning, no straightening, no areas, no logo — the original JPG is kept exactly as it was and only its metadata is replaced, without recompression. That is also how you repair a 360° photo that an editing program turned into a flat panorama by stripping its GPano fields.

Little planet, 360° video and tour video

A little planet is the same sphere projected straight down, so the ground becomes a small globe with the sky around it: switch the viewer to Little planet, turn and zoom until it looks right, and save it as a square image. Tunnel does the opposite and looks straight up. YouTube does not take 360° photos, so the 360° video turns the photo into a video file with the spherical metadata that YouTube and Facebook look for; after uploading it plays as a 360° video you can look around in, once YouTube has finished processing it. The tour video is an ordinary flat video that slowly looks all the way around — for Instagram, WhatsApp or a website, where a 360° file would not turn. Free videos end with a short Convertburda end card.