Warning: This is a bit of a geeky post, so if Pano photography isn’t your thing you probably won’t enjoy this post as much as I do :)
Earlier this month Facebook announced the support of 360 degree Panoramic photos to show on your timeline. While 360 cameras are still fairly new tech, Facebook have enabled the tech to allow you to post normal Pano Photos from your iPhone or Samsung to show up as 360 photos in Facebook.
Earlier this week I made a Pano Photo in Photoshop & PTGui from a number of stitched images that I had taken with the DJI Phantom 4. Unfortunately when I uploaded it to Facebook it didn’t see it as a Pano picture, so I had to do a bit of digging around to get it to work.
Here are a couple of “tips & tricks” I found to get your Pano to show in Facebook
- Standard iPhone (4s and up) Pano photos should work as long as they cover at least 100 degrees of view horizontally. You simply upload your Pano using the Facebook app on your iOS device and it should pick it up automatically. If it doesn’t it means that the image is probably too small
- Images should be in a 2:1 ratio format, with the maximum size of 6000px x 3000px. Facebook seems to be quite sticky about this. If it is larger than that it doesn’t seem to upload without a bit of tweaking
- If you edit this in Photoshop you may have to “inject” specific Metadata (EXIF) data into the image.
To inject EXIF data, I would recommend using the exif.er tool. You will need to change the following criteria. This should trigger Facebooks 360 processing when uploading- Make: RICOH
- Model: RICOH THETA S
- You can also add Make: “Apple” & Model: “iPhone 6s” if you have an image which is not 360
- Use the awesome tool PTGui to stitch images that you have taken into a Pano or 360 “sphere”
- You can also use the Google Streetview iOS app to take Spherical Photos which you can then upload to Facebook. Simply take the 360 pic with the built in camera and upload to FB using the FB app
Check out this really comprehensive post from Facebook about editing & injecting MetaData into 360 photos. Also, this post gives some insight into what you can and can’t do with 360 FB Photos.
This is really exciting tech and the advent of 360 cameras will def be one of the “next big things”, interested to see how this pans out :) Now if only Facebook will allow us to embed these Panos…