Uploaded a panorama and it showed up as a flat, stretched picture? The 360 tag inside the file is missing. Drop your photo below and this free tool writes the tag back — right in your browser, with nothing uploaded to any server.
Three steps, all of them inside your browser tab.
Pick a 2:1 panorama from a 360 camera, a stitched drone set or an AI generator — JPEG, PNG and WebP all work. The file is read on your own device, and the check underneath reports its size, its shape and whether 360 metadata is already present, so you know what the photo is missing.
One click splices the missing metadata into the file at the byte level. It records how the photo wraps onto a sphere plus its full width and height — the exact fields Facebook and Google Photos read before they switch an image from flat rectangle to draggable sphere. No metadata, no 360 view.
The tagged copy downloads straight out of the browser with its 360 metadata in place, ready to upload anywhere. Your original file is never modified, so if an editor strips the metadata again you can repeat the repair in seconds.
Built for panorama files that lost their 360 metadata somewhere in the edit.
Drop a JPEG and not one pixel is touched: the injector writes a small metadata block into the file and copies every other byte straight through, so the download is bit-for-bit your original. PNG and WebP differ — 360 metadata can only live inside a JPEG, so those are converted once in your browser first.
Facebook and Google Photos both look for the same 360 metadata before deciding whether a file is a flat rectangle or a full sphere you can drag around. Restoring that metadata is the entire difference between an upload that scrolls past as a stretched strip and one that opens as an interactive 360 photo.
Your panorama never leaves the browser. The file is read, tagged and handed back as a download on your own device, so nothing is uploaded and no copy is stored online. A very large panorama is limited only by your disk speed, never your upload speed.
Before any metadata is written, the image check reports the resolution, whether the frame is a true 2:1 panorama and whether 360 metadata already exists. Injecting a second metadata block into a file that already carries one fixes nothing, and the check says so up front.
As soon as the 360 metadata is in, the tagged copy opens in an interactive preview right on this page. Drag the horizon, check the seam where the left and right edges meet, and confirm the photo behaves as a sphere before you upload it anywhere.
No panorama on hand? One click loads a sample 2:1 panorama that has no 360 metadata, so you can watch the check, the injection and the preview run end to end. The sample goes through exactly the same pipeline as a photo you drop in yourself.
You shot a proper panorama, uploaded it, and the post shows a long stretched strip with a smeared sky instead of something you can drag around. The pixels are fine. What is missing is a few hundred bytes of 360 metadata inside the file — the label that tells an app “this photo is a full sphere”. Almost every image editor drops that metadata the moment it re-saves a photo, so a crop, an exposure tweak or a plain Save As is enough to break it, and nothing warns you. Writing the metadata back is a one-click repair; the longer platform checklist lives in our Facebook 360 photo fix guide.
Three workflows account for most photos that land here.
An Insta360, GoPro Max or Ricoh Theta writes correct metadata, then a colour pass in Lightroom or Photoshop strips it on the way out.
Drone or DSLR frames stitched in PTGui or Hugin — stitchers hand back a clean 2:1 frame but often no metadata at all.
A generator such as Text to Panorama AI may give you a PNG with nothing attached.
All three end the same way — drop the file in, click once, download a panorama carrying the 360 metadata platforms expect. PNG and WebP are converted to JPEG on the way through, because that is the only container 360 metadata can live in.
The obvious alternative is to reopen the panorama in an editor and export it again with the 360 option ticked. That works, but it decodes and re-compresses every pixel on the way out, and each round trip softens fine detail. It also depends on the editor writing the metadata correctly — the exact step that failed the first time.
A metadata fixer takes the opposite approach: it leaves the compressed image data untouched and splices a few hundred bytes of 360 metadata into the file header. Same pixels, correct label, no quality cost.
Each platform runs its own short checklist before opening a photo in sphere mode, so a file can satisfy one and fail the next. All of them want an exact 2:1 frame — the flattened world-map layout that 360 software calls equirectangular — plus JPEG encoding and 360 metadata in the file header. The rest is size limits.
| Where you post it | What the file must have | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| 2:1 JPEG with 360 metadata, up to 6000 × 3000 px and 30 MB | Bigger uploads are downscaled or refused, and the metadata can be lost with them | |
| Google Photos | 2:1 JPEG with 360 metadata | No published pixel ceiling; very large files just take longer to open |
| Web and desktop viewers | 2:1 image; metadata optional | Most let you force sphere mode by hand, so they are the safest place to preview |
That last row is the quick way to check your work before anything goes public: open the tagged copy in the 360 Panorama Viewer and drag it around. If the horizon stays level and the left and right edges meet without a seam, the metadata is doing its job.
The 360 metadata inside a photo file is a small block of XML tags that tells apps the picture is a full sphere rather than a flat rectangle. Those tags belong to a standard published by Google called GPano, and the metadata records how the image is projected — equirectangular, meaning the sphere is unwrapped into a flat 2:1 world map — plus the panorama’s full width and height in pixels. Facebook and Google Photos both read this metadata, which is why a good panorama that has lost it opens as an ordinary rectangle: the pixels are still a full sphere, but no app has been told so.
Facebook shows a 360 photo as a flat image when the file’s GPano XMP metadata is missing or was stripped by an editor. Most editors drop panorama metadata the moment they re-save a JPEG, so a crop or an export preset is usually all it takes. Facebook also expects a 2:1 equirectangular frame no larger than 6000 × 3000 pixels. Inject the metadata above and re-upload the tagged copy — the full checklist is in our Facebook 360 photo fix guide.
No — injecting 360 metadata into a JPEG does not re-encode or compress the image, because the tool only splices an extra XMP segment into the file’s byte stream. The pixel data is copied through untouched, so the tagged file looks identical to the original and grows by well under a kilobyte. PNG and WebP are the one exception: they must be converted to JPEG before metadata can be written, which is a single high-quality encode, not the repeated round trips you get from re-exporting in an editor. That repeated decoding, not the metadata, is what softens detail in a heavily edited panorama.
An equirectangular 360 photo needs an exact 2:1 aspect ratio, such as 4096 × 2048 or 6000 × 3000 pixels. Metadata only labels the image; it cannot reshape it, so a 3:2 or 16:9 frame still looks stretched even after injection. If your source is not 2:1, build a compliant panorama first with the Photo to 360° Converter, then come back and inject the metadata.
Yes — drop a PNG or WebP panorama in and the tool converts it to JPEG in your browser first, then injects the 360 metadata. The output has to be a JPEG because that is the only format Facebook and Google Photos will read 360 metadata from; a tagged PNG would still open as a flat picture. The conversion runs on your own device, so nothing is uploaded and your original PNG is left alone. Video is different — 360 clips store their projection in the container, not in an image header, so this tool does not touch them. For a rotating clip instead, use the 360 Photo to Video Converter.
Yes — the 360 photo metadata injector is free to use, because the injection runs locally in your browser, not on our servers. There is no watermark on the tagged JPEG and no queue to wait in. If you need to create panoramas as well as tag them, the Photo to 360° Converter turns an ordinary photo into a 2:1 frame ready for metadata.