What Is A 360 Degree Panoramic Photo And How To Make One

By Doug Dosdall On November 26, 2006 · 20 Comments

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A couple of days ago I created a 360 scrollable & zoomable panorama of the property I bought in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. The actual process of creating this panorama was surprisingly easy. The harder part was researching the tools I needed to do it.

So to save you some time, I’ll let you know how I did it.

Step 1 – Shoot Your Photos

First, take a series of photos with a 360º view of your subject. A tripod is the best way to do this. Just rotate the camera around. You need to make sure there is some overlap between the images so that they can be stitched together with no missing pieces.

Afterwards, download the photos from your camera to one folder on your computer.

Step 2 – Pick Your 360 Photo Software

You’ll need a program to stitch the images together into one wide panorama shot. There are, of course, many tools out there for creating a 360 panorama (you may have even gotten some with your camera software).

Programs like Photoshop will let stitch photos together, but the process is time-consuming and imperfect. Instead I looked for a program that was both easy to use and free to download, which is why I settled on AutoStitch.

The panorama I’ll show you how to create is a cylindrical shot (what you’d see if you pasted a series of pictures inside a tube). You can also create a spherical panorama so you can scroll in any direction. I haven’t tried one of these yet.

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Doug Dosdall is an avid wanderer, travel writer, and creator of TravelBlogs.com. Visit his personal blog here.

About The Author

Doug Dosdall

Doug Dosdall is a travel writer and travel website designer based in Vancouver, BC but with an addiction to warm winters in Latin America. His web design company is DohMedia and his latest projects are www.PuertoVallartaSatellite.com and www.PuertoViejoSatellite.com.

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http://www.virtualworld360.blogspot.com virtualworld360

Hi, I came across your interesting post and thought you might want to check out our 360 widgets. We are using a mixture of equirectangular projections and stills with audio and voice commentary, currently we have 4 different widgets to choose from which have been designed to fit in a blog sidebar or post, have a look in our gallery and let me know what you think. Regards Fraser Cairns
nick hoang

i just want to say thank you, such a useful post
http://www.idioimagers.org ryan libre

thanks, very helpful. one thing is, on your panoVR its obvious the photos were different brightnesses and taken at different exposures. try setting you camera to Manual if it has that setting. its the only way to insure your photos are exposed the same. thanks again!
http://kapalic.wordpress.com kapalic

Great and usefull post. I was just searching for a free software to create 360 photos, and found link here.

Thank you very much.
http://www.pkwebbs.com Prakash N

Great and such a wonderful post. I was looking for a similar kind of software for my clients website. Now i Gotta it from your post.
Thanks once again.
maria

do you know about a free software for mac users??
http://www.bsb8.com niko

thank you for the post,

i want to ask, is there possible to put some certain node/button in the middle of the picture/movie to be used as a link to another movie/file?

thanks again
http://www.feelsuccessful.com Sergio

Your post has been very helpful. I´ve wanted to do panoramics of outdoors to share with my friends and did not know how. Very clear explanation.

Thanks
http://www.flypark.cl gerardo sanchez

Very helpful, thanks a lot.
greets from chili
Guy Lafond

I wasn’t expecting such an friendly free software for 360 photos! I made a very crude test without a tripod in my living room and the result was amazing. Thanks for taking the time to do this, very much appreciated! We are soon taking a trip to New York City, this will be a great place for panoramic 360 photos! Guy
http://www.holidaysfromhome.co.uk Claire

Wow! I wanted to do these; but didn’t know how. Thank you so much. The only problem I’m having is my video is blurred. Any ideas on what I’ve done wrong?
David

This isn’t 360 panorama and I think your advice is misleading for a beginner. Its just normal panorama. If you wanted to do 360 pano, you’d need special equipment (specifcally a pano head) to rotate the camera on its nodal point, Just thought I’d point out 360 pano photos are not as simple as you mentioned,
http://www.paradisecoorg.com deeps

hi,

its a very nice tip that i got from your page that, now i can work on my panoramic pics…

Thanks a lot
Rodolfo Oviedo

Hello, your tutorial is amazing, I was surfing the web so hard to find a software to make a 360° picture, and finally I found this spot. Thanks a lot!!! Congrats for buying a property in Costa Rica, I’m from Costa Rica too.
http://tourismpicks.com Mike Behnken

Thank you very much, this is exactly waht I was looking for. I would also like to know how to do it so it’s not a video but controlled by the mouse…. do you have a solution for this?
Mahdieh Sb

hello i really need such a software to turn my 360 degree images to scrollable video but ‘ Pano2QVTR ‘ this software not works, coz it’s not possible to import images, do u have any solution to me? or if you could help me by introducing other suitable website ..
TQ
http://Google Dijay Callaghan

i have made several ‘flat’ panoramas and would like to stitch the ends together to make 360 cylindrical panoramas. How can I do this?
http://www.productcapture.co.uk tim heat

I usually have difficulties with pano images. Mainly due to not having the correct tripod head. I found this top 10 360° photography tips blog. There’s a few useful things on there. http://360photographytop10.blogspot.com/
http://www.isoftway.com Muthu

I was not able to understand how 360 view pictures were made in movies now i got the idea how they are being made. thanks for sharing the knowledge.
http://www.eyalg.com/ Eyal Gurevitch

AutoStitch is, indeed, an amazing tool,
not only as a free tool, but compared to the expensive ones as well…

What Is A 360 Degree Panoramic Photo And How To Make One

Step 1 – Shoot Your Photos

Step 2 – Pick Your 360 Photo Software

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