HOW TO VIEW AND SHARE 360° PANORAMAS

A common question is how to view and share 360° panoramas, both offline and online. You may want to view them yourself, share with friends or clients, or publish them on social media. This guide outlines the available options in detail.

If you are looking for instructions on how to create 360° panoramas with PanoVolo, see the separate how-to guide on creating spherical panoramas.

What is a 360° Panorama?

A 360° panorama is essentially a JPEG image file with a width-to-height ratio of exactly 2:1. It also contains extra metadata that marks it as a 360° panorama. PanoVolo automatically includes this metadata when saving.

Any effects you may have seen, such as autorotation (seen in our gallery), “little planet” transitions, or animated zooms, come from the panorama viewer software. These are not part of the image itself.

Viewing Locally on Your Computer

For local viewing, FSPViewer is a reliable option. It is free, runs on Windows and macOS, and provides a simple interface and high-quality rendering.

You can also check panoramas directly inside PanoVolo by choosing View → 3D Sphere after stitching. This opens the image in PanoVolo’s built-in interactive viewer.

Displaying on Photo Sharing Services

Services like Google Photos and Flickr recognize and display 360° panoramas automatically. Simply upload the panorama and it will open in their interactive viewer. In Google Photos, a circular icon in the corner of the image indicates that it is a panorama.

Panoramas can also be uploaded to Google Maps, but they must be tied to an existing place or a new location submitted for the approval first. It is not possible to attach panoramas to arbitrary map coordinates. The maximum panorama resolution allowed on Google Photos or Maps is currently 100 MPix.

Sharing on Social Media

Facebook supports 360° panoramas in its built-in interactive viewer. Facebook accepts panoramas up to 130 megapixels, which means the horizontal resolution cannot exceed about 16000 pixels. To ensure compatibility, PanoVolo offers a “Downscaled for social media” save mode that automatically resizes panoramas to 8000 × 4000 pixels, a size accepted by most social media and photo-sharing platforms. See our FaceBook page for 360° panorama examples.

For macOS users posting via Safari, drag and drop the panorama into the Facebook “Create post” window. Selecting the file through the upload dialog strips the required 360° metadata and image will be displayed as flat image instead of panorama. When Facebook detects the panorama correctly, you will see the 360° icon at the bottom right image corner.

Instagram does not support 360° panoramas at this time.

Specialized 360° Content Sharing Services

Several online services specialize in hosting and displaying 360° panoramas. The most popular are Kuula, Momento360, 360Cities, and PanoCool. All of these services provide interactive panorama viewing. Some include extra features such as animated transitions and tools for building virtual tours. Resolution limits vary: Kuula, for example, supports panoramas up to 15000 pixels wide, while PanoCool currently has no resolution or file size limits. If your panorama is too large for a given service, use PanoVolo’s “Downscaled for social media” option to generate a compatible version.

Self-Hosting Panoramas

Another option is to host panoramas yourself on your own website.

On WordPress sites, you can install a panorama plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Once installed, point the plugin to the panorama file and it will be displayed interactively. Note, however, that images uploaded via Media → Add Media File are usually resized to 2560 pixels wide, which is too low for 360° viewing. To avoid this, manually upload the full-resolution file to a separate folder on your web server or to a file hosting service, and then link to it in panorama plugin.

If your site does not use WordPress, you can integrate open-source panorama libraries such as Photo Sphere Viewer, Marzipano, or Pannellum. These are all free and open-source, though they require some setup. Marzipano also includes a virtual tour builder that allows you to link multiple panoramas and add hotspots.

Photo Sphere Viewer also has a very handy “playground” that allows for testing panoramas online.

Virtual Tour Builders

Virtual tour software combines multiple panoramas with other content such as still photos, videos, or clickable markers to create an immersive experience.

Desktop applications include krpano and Pano2VR.

Web-based and cloud solutions are becoming increasingly popular, with options such as the Marzipano Tour Tool (free), Panoee, Kuula, TeliportMe, and PanoCool.

The open-source libraries mentioned above (Photo Sphere Viewer and Pannellum) can also be used to create tours by manually adding hotspots, but this approach requires some programming knowledge.

Conclusion

Once you create and save a 360° panorama in PanoVolo, you have a wide range of options for viewing and sharing it. These range from simple local viewing on your computer, to uploading on photo services and social media, to using specialized 360° platforms or hosting panoramas yourself. For those who want to go further, virtual tour builders provide a way to connect multiple panoramas into complete interactive experiences.