OneTaskBy Tim King · Updated
360 Panorama Viewer Online
Drag to Look Around a 360 Equirectangular Photo and Save a Snapshot
OneTask is free, with no sign-up, and built by one person.
If this tool saved you time, a coffee helps keep new ones coming.
How the 360° Panorama Viewer works
This 360 panorama viewer online lets you look around any 360 photo. A 360° photo from a phone, a Ricoh Theta, an Insta360 or a rendering engine is stored as an equirectangular image, a flat 2:1 picture that only makes sense once it is wrapped around a sphere. Drop one here and stand inside it: drag to look around, scroll to zoom, switch on a slow auto-rotate and download a flat snapshot of any direction. The file stays in your browser.
360 panorama viewer online: what an equirectangular image is
The format maps the full sphere of directions onto a rectangle twice as wide as it is tall. The horizontal axis is longitude, running the full 360° around you, and the vertical axis is latitude from straight up to straight down. The horizon sits along the middle row, and the top and bottom rows are a single point each, stretched across the whole width, which is why the sky and floor look smeared in the flat file. Wrapped onto the inside of a sphere with a camera at the centre, those distortions vanish and the picture looks the way the scene did.
This viewer expects exactly that layout. If your image is not 2:1 the statistics line warns you, and the picture still loads but stretches to fill the sphere. Cropped panoramas that only cover part of the sphere, such as a 180° fisheye or a cylindrical strip, will look wrong here; they need a different projection.
Looking around
Drag left and right to turn, up and down to tilt. The field of view slider is the zoom: 75° is a natural wide-angle view, 40° feels like a telephoto and 110° shows almost a whole hemisphere at once with strong fisheye bending at the edges. The mouse wheel changes the same slider. Auto- rotate turns the camera slowly for a hands-free tour, and Fit view snaps back to the starting direction.
On a phone one finger turns the view. There is no gyroscope mode; the page is deliberately simple and works the same everywhere.
Downloading a snapshot
Download PNG renders the current direction at the size chosen in the rail, up to 3840 pixels wide. This is a rectilinear projection, the same as a normal photograph, so it is the way to pull a straight, undistorted still out of a 360° photo: point at the part you want, set the field of view so it frames well, and download. Because the render is done from the full resolution texture, a snapshot from an 8K panorama is sharp even at 4K.
File size and resolution
A consumer 360° camera produces 5.7K to 8K images, typically 5760 × 2880 or 7680 × 3840, and laptops handle them without trouble. Very large files, above about 16K wide, may exceed the maximum texture size of a phone's graphics chip and appear blank; resize the image first with the image resizer and try again.
Privacy
The image is read from disk straight into graphics memory. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the page keeps working offline once loaded.
FAQ
What file formats can I open?
Any image your browser can display: JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and GIF. Most 360° cameras save JPEG. HDR formats such as .hdr and .exr are not supported; convert them to a tone-mapped JPEG or PNG first.
Why does my panorama look stretched or split?
The image is probably not equirectangular. Check that it is exactly twice as wide as it is tall and covers the full sphere. Photos stitched by phone apps sometimes add black bars top and bottom to reach 2:1, which look like a black ceiling and floor; that is in the file, not a viewer problem.
Can I save a normal photo from a 360° image?
Yes. Point the view at the part of the scene you want, adjust the field of view until it is framed, choose a PNG size and press Download PNG. The result is a flat rectilinear image with straight lines, the same as a photo taken with a normal lens from that spot.
Does the viewer read the metadata in the file?
No. The XMP GPano metadata that cameras embed is ignored; the image is treated as a full 2:1 sphere regardless. If the file contains a partial panorama described only by metadata it will be stretched to the full sphere.
See also: all Mockups & 3D Making tools, Images, Audio, Video & Screen, PDF, SVG, Simulations & Screensavers, Generative Art, Chart Makers, 3D Model Viewers, Drawing Pads, Diagram Makers, 3D Science, Tracker Music.
Related tools
Little Planet Maker
Squash a 360° panorama into a little planet PNG.
Product Spin Viewer
Drop a photo sequence and drag to spin the product round.
Image Dimensions Inspector
Pixel size, aspect ratio, megapixels and CSS size for any image.
Image Resizer
Resize to a width, height or percent with the aspect ratio locked.
EXIF Stripper
Cut GPS and camera metadata out of a photo, losslessly.