One holiday flat, one 360° photo and no platform subscription
Picture someone who rents out a small holiday flat by a lake. They took a 360° photo of the living room with their phone, and on the phone it looks great. On their website, it shows up as a flat, oddly stretched picture that guests can’t look around in.
The usual advice is to sign up for a 360° hosting platform, upload your image there and paste the code it gives you. That works. It also means an account, a free tier with limits, and a third party that hosts a picture of your living room for as long as the plan lasts.
An estate agent with a dozen listings has the same problem twelve times over. This panorama viewer is built for that case: load the image in your browser, check it, and take away a file you own.
Why an interactive 360° image is harder than it looks
At first glance a 360° photo is an ordinary JPG. What makes it special is the projection. The whole sphere around the camera is unrolled into a rectangle twice as wide as it is tall, the so called equirectangular format. Google’s photo sphere metadata documentation describes the same layout: a full photo sphere covers 360 by 180 degrees, and equirectangular is the projection its products support.
A normal image tag shows that rectangle as it is. A panorama viewer wraps it back around a virtual sphere and redraws the scene whenever someone drags, which is what makes the experience immersive.
The common ways to get there each come with a catch:
| Route | What you do | Catch |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted 360° platform | Upload your image, copy their embed code | Account, plan limits, the picture lives on their servers |
| WordPress plugin | Install a plugin, place a block or shortcode | Only works in that CMS, one more plugin to maintain |
| JavaScript library | Add scripts, write some config | Needs someone comfortable with code |
| Our HTML export | Download one file, upload it to your own web space | You need web space you can upload to |
The last row is the route our tool takes, free and without the need to create an account.
What happens when you open a photo
Drag and drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the viewer above, or check out the built-in sample of an alpine lake first. Nothing is uploaded. Your browser decodes the image and draws it with WebGL. Click and drag or swipe to look around; the view keeps gliding a little when you let go.
Zoom with the mouse wheel, a pinch or the plus and minus buttons. The field of view ranges from 30° to 100°. On a keyboard, the arrow keys turn by 5°, or 15° with Shift held down. Home jumps back to the start view and F switches to fullscreen.
The overlay buttons cover zoom, auto-rotate and fullscreen. If a browser can’t put the element into real fullscreen, the view fills the window instead. On phones and tablets you also see a motion control button: move the device and the scene follows. iPhones ask for permission the first time you tap it.
Auto-rotate turns at 1 to 20 degrees per second and pauses while you interact. If your system asks for reduced motion, it starts switched off.
The tool reads the aspect ratio of your picture and decides how to show it:
- 2:1 (within about 2 %): a full sphere. You can look all the way around, straight up and straight down.
- Wider than 2:1: shown all the way around, with limited tilt. Many phone panorama strips land here.
- Narrower than 2:1: shown as a partial panorama. A “Horizontal coverage” slider (30° to 360°) sets how much of the circle the shot really spans, which fixes panoramic images that look squeezed or stretched.
- Very large files: scaled down to what the device’s graphics chip can display (at most 8192 px per side), with a notice. Your original stays untouched.
How to embed a 360 photo on your website, step by step
Back to the holiday flat. Here is how the owner gets from phone shot to interactive panorama:
- Open your image in the tool. Drop it on the stage or use the file button. It stays on your computer.
- Find the best angle. Look around until you see what guests should see first, like the window with the lake behind it.
- Click the “Set as start view” button. Downloads, embeds and videos all open on that angle.
- Create the standalone HTML. You get one .html file with the photo embedded as a JPEG and the viewer built in. Pick the image size inside: up to 4096, 6144 or 8192 px. Bigger is sharper and heavier, and the tool estimates the size.
- Upload the file to your web space. Use FTP, your host’s file manager or a media library that accepts HTML.
- Copy the embed code. Paste the file’s link into the embed field, choose a height (360, 480 or 640 px, or 16:9) and copy the iframe.
- Paste the code into your page. In WordPress, a Custom HTML block does the job. Most site builders have a similar embed element.
The upload in step 5 matters. An iframe can only show a file that is already online, and we don’t host your panorama, so the HTML has to be on your own web space first. In return, it stays under your control.
The standalone file also works offline, for example as an email attachment for a client. It has drag, zoom, keyboard controls, auto-rotate, fullscreen and your start view. Motion control is not part of the export, so users on phones swipe instead.
For GIFs and videos next to the panorama, see the guide on adding animation to a website.
Share it as a video or GIF
Social media posts, listing portals and messengers don’t accept HTML. If you want to share the room there, the tool records one seamless 360° turn from your start view.
- Formats: MP4, WebM or GIF
- Aspect ratios: 16:9, 1:1, 9:16 or 4:3
- Length: 4 to 30 seconds
- Frame rate: 30 fps for video, 12 fps for GIF, and GIFs are capped at 640 px wide to keep the file small
Partial panoramas can’t do a full turn, so their video pans from one edge to the other and back. A slow 20-second turn in 9:16 makes a good vertical clip. If you are using several flat photos instead, the Slideshow Maker is the better fit.
Where 360 photos and virtual tours come from
Common sources:
- Phone panorama modes. They usually produce a wide strip, shown all the way around with limited tilt.
- Photo sphere or 360° modes in some phone camera apps. Availability depends on the phone model and app version.
- Dedicated 360° cameras with two fisheye lenses. Their apps export full 2:1 equirectangular images.
- Stitching software that merges several overlapping shots into a sphere.
This domain has a long history here. From 2004 to 2016 it carried the Amara Flash programs, including a Flash panorama and a virtual tour maker. This browser tool is their successor; the about page has the history.
FAQ
What is a panorama viewer?
A program or web page that wraps a flat 360° image around a virtual sphere, so you can look around by dragging, swiping or moving your phone.
Can I view 360 photos without an app?
Yes. This one runs in any current browser with WebGL, on a computer or a phone. You don’t install anything, and the photo never leaves your device.
Why does my 360 photo look stretched?
Usually because it isn’t 2:1. Phone panoramas and cropped shots have other ratios. They are shown as partial panoramas, and the “Horizontal coverage” slider corrects the angle.
Is this 360 image viewer free?
Yes, and you don’t need an account. The HTML, MP4, WebM or GIF files you create are yours.
How do I add a 360 photo to WordPress?
Upload the HTML file to your server or media library, paste its link into the embed field, then put the iframe code into a Custom HTML block.