Many of the popular 360 cameras available on the market don’t have in camera stitching, Gear360 & Xiaomi Mi Sphere for example. Before you start shooting and sharing 360 panoramas, here’s one important thing you need to know about the stitching process to avoid problems displaying your photos.

The stitching process is done on the fly when you save the photos from the camera to the mobile app on your phone or tablet.

It is possible not to use the mobile application and copy all the photos via USB or memory card directly from the camera to a computer, but it’s an unnecessary extra step in the workflow. It’s quicker to keep all your workflow on your phone. Photos copied directly from the camera to a PC will be unstitched and will not display correctly. You will still have to use PC software to stitch your shots.

If you’re not sure if your photos are stitched or not, it’s really not difficult to spot the difference. A raw, unstitched photo from say a Samsung Gear 360 is composed of two fisheye shots next to each other, one from each lens. It will typically look a bit like this:

When you save your photo from the camera onto the mobile app, it is stitched and transformed into a correct equirectangular projection on the fly. A correctly stitched photo looks more like this:

Only the latter format will be correctly displayed in 360, so make sure to always check your photos are stitched before sharing. Now you know that get sharing your work, I’ve put a list together of all the 360 photo sites I’ve come across so far.

I  hope you find this useful!