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:
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| # Exiv2 Google Photo Sphere command file | |
| # ------------------------- | |
| # | |
| # $ exiv2 -m photo-sphere.txt file ... | |
| reg GPano http://ns.google.com/photos/1.0/panorama/ | |
| set Xmp.GPano.UsePanoramaViewer XmpText True | |
| set Xmp.GPano.ProjectionType XmpText equirectangular | |
| set Xmp.GPano.CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels XmpText 4096 | |
| set Xmp.GPano.CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels XmpText 2048 | |
| set Xmp.GPano.FullPanoWidthPixels XmpText 4096 | |
| set Xmp.GPano.FullPanoHeightPixels XmpText 2048 | |
| set Xmp.GPano.CroppedAreaLeftPixels XmpText 0 | |
| set Xmp.GPano.CroppedAreaTopPixels XmpText 0 |
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.
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?
Anything bigger than 2048px gets cropped. This won’t have any impact on Pannellum, I just haven’t had much time to work on it recently.
This post is a bit out of date now. ExifTool now supports the tags, starting with version 9.07. Also, Google finally posted the specifications: https://developers.google.com/panorama/metadata/.
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?
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.
Can you please add some example lines for add gps geo/data ?
http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/faq.html#Q14
Note that you no longer have to add these tags to photosphere as Autoawesome does the work for you.