How To Get Facebook 360 Camera

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Hacking Full-size Camera Panoramas to Work in Facebook

UDPATE 2016-08-01: It turns out there is a very technical article on Facebook written past Eric Cheng, the Head of Immersive Imaging at Facebook describing this very thing. His article is quite technical (and also includes info on spherical panoramas) and while it does mostly mirror my findings, information technology's a long-winded style of describing what I ultimately explain how to practise very simply. And then if yous're looking for a how-to, spring to the terminate of this article and follow the few simple steps!

Facebook's new panorama feature is pretty cool. If you haven't seen information technology, a pano uploaded to Facebook shows as a scene you can not only pan around with your finger, but actually tilt and plow your phone to explore. Neat!

I tried uploading a panoramic I'd created in Lightroom, but it only showed as an ultra-broad photo in Facebook, and not as an explorable panorama. The general consensus among my friends on Facebook was that only smartphone-shot panos would load in Facebook properly. To this I thought, "there must be a way around information technology!". I figured what was needed was to play tricks Facebook into assertive that a photo came from the iPhone, even if information technology didn't.

Hither'south the photo I'm working with… it was created with 52 photos shot on a Panasonic LUMIX GX85 , adding up to 29,919 × four,582 pixels, which comes to 137 Megapixels.

Original 52 photo panoramic shot on a LUMIX GX85 and stitched into a 29,919 × 4,582 pixel (137 megapixel) super-broad image!

Facebook could be sniffing the file any number of ways… EXIF data stating camera make or model, resolution, pixel height, and then-on. So I set out to "cleft the code", equally it were!

I'm writing this post as I experiment… it's the easiest way to continue rails. So it's potentially quite long… and actually only relevant to the curious. The stop result tin exist found at the stop of the mail!

Knowing if a panoramic volition display properly in Facebook

First off allow's look at how you know if a photo will work equally a facebook pano or not. When you load a photo in the iPhone app, you'll first encounter a little globe icon on the thumbnail telling you that it's a pano:

In the Facebook app, if you see this globe icon on the thumbnail, it's a panoramic photo — but this doesn't mean it'll load as a pano on the Facebook app!

Once loaded, you'll once more see this globe icon on the wide image. If youdon't see the globe at this point, that ways that while originally Facebook saw it as a panoramic photo, now that it's loaded, it's not going to display as one.

Once loaded, this icon must bear witness up once more for Facebook to display it equally an explorable panoramic photo. If y'all don't see this, all you'll go is a super wide photograph in your feed.

Now that nosotros know how to tell if a photo will piece of work or not, it'due south time to make a photo that won't work, work!

(Caput's upwards… this is gonna take a while…)

Level:: Advanced
App:: Adobe Lightroom Classic (pre-CC) Adobe Photoshop Exif Editor Facebook PhotoSync
Platform:: macOS iOS Android Windows
Author:: PhotoJoseph