Facebook 360 photos

[PGale]

Facebook 360 photos

by PGale » Thu Jun 16, 2016 11:46 am

I'm just trialling autopano etc and thought I'd try uploading an image to Facebook as they just recently launched 360 Photos.

I've tried a wide range of output size settings but they always fail in FB just after the upload - and yes, I am uploading correctly.

So unless I'm outputting incorrectly, looks like FB doesn't support the metadata in the image. Apparently PTGui does, so maybe i'll buy that instead if I can't get this to work.

Has anyone successfully uploaded an autopano image to FB and have it recognised as a 360 Photo?

Thanks.

[PGale]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by PGale » Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:08 pm

I've subsequently just tried PTGui and it works a treat with no special settings. So looks to me like Autopano isn't compatible metadata wise unless I'm missing something.

[Annis]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by Annis » Thu Jun 16, 2016 2:11 pm

What exactly happened when you tried to use the image?
What image did you use? What were it's dimensions?

Autopano images are accepted if it was rendered with any version after 3.5.

The images mustn't be too large, the error message says max 30k pixels in any dimension which is untrue as far as I've seen from testing, anything beyond 13k pixels that I have tried has not worked.
Also if you have edited your panorama after rendering, you'll be missing the necessary metadata to upload.

http://www.kolor.com/2016/06/15/how-to- ... -facebook/

[jeremyg7]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by jeremyg7 » Thu Jun 23, 2016 2:29 am

I'm having some issues with Autopano for uploading FB360 photos as well. Sometimes it works, but usually it doesn't. Using Google Street View's app works 100% of the time. I think there's some Sphere XMP Metadata conflict but I'm not sure what category. It 'seems' to recognize that it's a panorama as it initially says uploading "360 Photo", but then it changes to "Photo" when it finishes uploading.

[Annis]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by Annis » Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:25 am

You should send a message to Facebook help, all I know is the limited information in their help page and from what I've actually tested. I don't know what could cause the detection to fail mid-upload.

[PGale]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by PGale » Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:37 am

It seems that the EXIF data can be the culprit. There's a group on FaceBook 'dronepan' where this has been discussed a lot. Sometimes the EXIF data is removed when saving and that can prevent it being recognised. Also, ensuring 2:1 image ratio and max size of 6000x3000 can help.

[Annis]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by Annis » Thu Jun 23, 2016 9:23 am

Panoramas output from recent versions of Autopano (3.5+) already have the necessary xmp data to be detected correctly, even partial panoramas, so if you've edited your panorama afterwards, you will likely have lost that information.

[PGale]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by PGale » Thu Jun 23, 2016 9:32 am

That wasn't the case when I originally tried it - some were recognised and some were failing. I've not tried recently though as I'm now using Photoshop as a final stage. Maybe there was an issue with the FB import process at the time?

[Annis]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by Annis » Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:25 am

That's quite possible, it's a very new feature, there's bound to be some use cases they hadn't planned for that need straightening out.

So far I've also noticed that for a 360° panorama where the cubeface is of 1500px, they resize the cubeface to be larger (1536px), which has added a minuscule hole to the nadir.

[signmaster]

Re: Facebook 360 photos

by signmaster » Thu Jun 23, 2016 12:59 pm

I have found that my Autopano Giga 360s work OK on Facebook at 6000 x 3000 pixels, more info here https://www.facebook.com/notes/eric-cheng/editing-360-photos-injecting-metadata/10156930564975277
Steve