Google Photo Spheres

With the introduction of the Nexus 4, Google has added “Photo Sphere” support in Google+. Here’s an example. Google’s viewer could use some work, but as it’s a new feature, it should improve over time. Since the only thing that makes a photo a “Photo Sphere” is a bit of XMP data, one can easily make a panorama stitched with other software, such a Hugin, a “Photo Sphere.” Here’s a short Exiv2 command file to add the required information:

Just change the heights and widths to appropriate values and run it to make a full equirectangular panorama a “Photo Sphere.” There’s also support for partial panoramas, but I haven’t looked into it as the Nexus 4 hasn’t even been released yet.

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7 Responses to Google Photo Spheres

  1. Darethehair says:

    Thanks for the tip! Just finished trying it out on Google+, and seems to work fine. Not sure how large of a pic is permitted for upload, though.

    Will this service have any impact on the development of Pannellum?

  2. Chris says:

    I used my Android phone to take a Photo Sphere picture, and I’m trying to use that with Pannellum. But since Pannellum requires a full equirectangular panorama, it skews the top and bottom of my Photo Sphere. How can I make it stop skewing it?

    • Matthew Petroff says:

      I’m working on adding support for this kind of panorama, but for the moment, use an image editor to pad the top and bottom of the image such that it has a 2:1 aspect ratio.

  3. Can you please add some example lines for add gps geo/data ?

  4. Hari says:

    Note that you no longer have to add these tags to photosphere as Autoawesome does the work for you.

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