Turning a screenshot into a Facebook 360° Image

Andrés Cuervo
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

This is a short post showing how you can turn any equirectangular photo into a 360° image on Facebook that displays like this:

A GIF of the 360° uploaded at: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1729430273738498&set=a.343377975677075.98057.100000146252251&type=3&theater

You could use a photo like this plate carrée projection, but I’ll get my photo as a 360° screenshot from an A-Frame scene like this one for this tutorial.

There are really only a few steps involved:

1 While you’re viewing an A-Frame scene take a 360° (e.g. equirectangular) screenshot by pressing <ctrl> + <alt> + <shift> + s. That should give you an image like below in your computer’s “Downloads” folder:

Example 360° image, not yet displayed as a 360° photo though!

2 Right now, we just have a normal 2D image, and Facebook would treat it as such if we were to upload it — we need to edit the metadata of the image to specify that we have a 360° image.

Facebook seems to only read JPGs for 360° exif data, so I convert the A-Frame screenshot (saved as a PNG initially) into a JPG before injecting my metadata, although if I’m wrong feel free to let me know!

If you don’t want to use a scripting tool, I’d recommend https://www.thexifer.net/, a website that you can use to upload and edit exif data. Really all you need is to set “ProjectionType” to “equirectangular”.

I use exiftool to run the following command:

exiftool -ProjectionType=”equirectangular” photo.jpg

And that’s all you need to Facebook to recognize this as a 360° image!

3 Once you have your exif injected photo, you should be able to just upload it to Facebook like any other photo and once it processes, you’ll have something like this:

Final notes:

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Andrés Cuervo

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On The Things That Interest Me (Various, And Predictable) cwervo.com

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