360° photos and panoramas

A 360° photo opens from inside, as if you stood where the camera was. A wide panorama fills the window's height and lets you look along it. Nothing to install, nothing to switch on.

A 360° photo: look around inside it

• Drag to look around — left and right all the way round, up to the sky and down to your feet.
• Turn the wheel to look closer or wider: from a narrow 35° to a wide 100°.
• The compass at the bottom left shows which way you look, and how wide.
• Home or the fit button turns you back to the front: the middle of the photo, where the camera pointed.

To see the photo as it is stored in the file — one long, stretched picture of everything around — choose ⋯ → View → Flat: the picture as it is in the file; Look around inside it goes back.

Which photos are 360°

Those exactly twice as wide as they are tall, and either marked as a 360° photo inside the file (as phones and stitching apps do) or taken with a 360° camera: Ricoh Theta, Insta360, GoPro MAX and Fusion, Kandao QooCam, Xiaomi Mi Sphere, Samsung Gear 360, LG 360 CAM. The plate at the top left then says 360° photo. Any other picture of 2:1 is shown flat, as a panorama.

A panorama: look along it

Any picture at least twice as wide as it is tall is a panorama, and the plate says Panorama. Instead of shrinking it to a thin strip, the viewer fills the window's height with it.

• Drag the picture, or turn the wheel, to look along it.
• Click or drag on the mini-map to go to a part of it.
• 0 or the fit button shows it whole, as a strip; again, and it fills the height.

In a slideshow a panorama can stay longer and glide from one end to the other: Panoramas longer, moving along in the slideshow's settings.

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