How to Tweet Interactive, “Scrubbable” 360 Photos on Twitter
The goal for me as an Outdoor-Blogger is to show my adventures as “true to life” as possible. 360 photos are a great way to deliver the beauty of being at a mountain peak right to the displays of my followers and let them explore and discover the view on their own.
This works great and is really easy to do if you have a Smartphone (and the Google StreetView App) or a 360 camera like the Samsung Gear 360 or the Ricoh Theta S. On Facebook, all you have to do is to upload the image and Facebook takes care of the technical details. Here’s an example on my Facebook Page.
If you want to achieve the same result on Twitter, it gets tricky. After some time experimenting, I think I’ve found a solution that works.
Introducing ScratchReel, a “secret” Twitter feature.
In 2014, Twitter bought a company called SnappyTV to give content producers better tools for creating and sharing videos in real time. One year later, SnappyTV introduced a feature called ScratchReel, which lets users on Twitter fast forward and rewind animated GIFs.
ScratchReel has been available only for SnappyTV customers for quite some time, but the feature is now also part of Twitter’s Media Studio, which is available to everybody*. 🎉
(* or use Creatives -> Media at https://ads.twitter.com)
ScratchReel is a great feature, but unfortunately, usage never really took of. (😢). The good thing is, you can use it to imitate Facebook’s 360 photo viewer. Here’s how:
Step 1: Convert the 360 photo to a video
I’ve used an iOS app called pi2video, which lets you convert spherical images to videos. Just import an equirectangular image from your camera roll. The edit button lets you change the vertical field of view. For the best result, don’t forget to disable “Fade In&Out”. Then export the video.
Step 2: Turn the video into a GIF
I used GIF Brewery for macOS, but every “video to gif” converter should work. It’s important to preserve as much image quality as possible while keeping the resulting GIF file under 10 MB. It seems that this is the upper limit of the Media Studio library.
Step 3: Upload your GIF
Upload the file in the library section of Twitter Media Studio and use the blue Tweet-Button to turn it into a ScratchReel.
Voilà. Your followers are now able to view the scene from every angle by simply scrubbing on the photo. It’s as easy as: ⏪👆⏩. This works on the web and on Twitter’s mobile apps. Here’s an example.
Hi, I’m Fabian. You can find me on Twitter at@i_am_fabs. I am a Freelance Web Developer, Designer and Content Creator living in Vienna, Austria. I like to build things. If you want to contact or hire me, just send me a direct message on Twitter or a mail.
