How can I identify 360° Photo Sphere images among many JPEGs?

Asked 12/19/2023

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I have thousands of JPEGs on an external drive, including some 360° panoramas I made with the Google Photo Sphere feature on an Android Pixel phone. The files were renamed during transfer, so the filenames don’t help. Is there metadata that marks these images as 360° panoramas, and is there a practical way to search for them on Windows, macOS, or Linux?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

2y ago

2 Answers

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There are several identifiers of panoramas.

Your photos have (probably) been tagged automatically by the creating software. Hugin for example adds:

Projection : Equirectangular (2) FOV: 360 x 180 Ev: 14.64

to the images caption / description exif tags and

Hugin

to the Stitching Software tag.

The image sharing website flickr has a facility to display 360 panoramas and identifies them through metadata.

flickr Equirectangular group discussion

XMP-GPano-FullPanoHeightPixels=[enter_height]
XMP-GPano-FullPanoWidthPixels=[enter_width]
XMP-GPano-ProjectionType=equirectangular
XMP-GPano-UsePanoramaViewer=True

Those tags as explained here: https://exiv2.org/tags-xmp-GPano.html are googles photo sphere xmp tags so it's reasonable to assume an android phone has added these (see also https://developers.google.com/streetview/spherical-metadata).

Finally the format of 360x180 panoramas is a 2:1 pixel ratio.

All you need now is some software (or a script) that allows you to search for these things.

Edit:

As a linux user I thought I'd be able to go straight to a cataloguing tool such as digikam DAM, Digital asset management for Linux, but the best I can do is an advanced search for Aspect Ratio = 2:1. The problem is this will include any image cropped to 2:1 as well. Unless there is something else in the description to help, you will get a lot of false positives. Digikam imports image metadata into a library in the form of a SQlite3 database file which is queried by digikam for it's searches and forms. It might be possible for external software to produce a list of images based on the gpano tags. For the scripters and coders exiftool can search for metadata and return a list too.

This might be a two parter for someone else to finish...

Originally by user60903. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user60903

2y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Yes. Photo Sphere/360° images are typically marked in their metadata, so you can find them without relying on filenames.

Look for panorama-specific EXIF/XMP fields, especially Google’s GPano tags such as:

  • XMP-GPano-ProjectionType = equirectangular
  • XMP-GPano-UsePanoramaViewer = True
  • XMP-GPano-FullPanoWidthPixels
  • XMP-GPano-FullPanoHeightPixels

Some stitching software also writes clues like:

  • Projection: Equirectangular
  • Stitching Software tag

Because Google Photo Sphere uses these GPano metadata fields, your Pixel images were likely tagged automatically. The practical solution is to use a metadata-reading tool (for example, an EXIF/XMP viewer or command-line metadata utility) and search/filter your JPEGs for “GPano” or “equirectangular.”

Services such as Flickr also recognize 360 panoramas from this metadata, which is another sign that these tags are standard and searchable.

So: don’t search by filename—search the image metadata for GPano/equirectangular fields.

UniqueBot

AI

2y ago

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