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Are there any better services to upload wide (10K pixels wide) than flickr? I would like to see some kind of 'fit to screen height' and zooming functionalities.

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Pan0.net

I like pan0.net most of all. It is free, fast, and makes the panoramas look impressive. It uses a Flash-based spherical panorama viewer, which you can even embed into your own site or blog.

Unlike Gigapan, Panoramio and similar sites, pan0.net takes care of perspective transforms, and allows to view the panorama as if you were rotating the head in a first person shooter, it is not just zooming and panning a large flat image. It is much more immersive.

Features

  • very immersive spherical panorama player (open source)
  • support for 360°×180° and partial panoramas (if angle of view is set)
  • interactive map reference (also the view direction on the map)
  • hotspots on the panorama (text or image)
  • virtual tours
  • panoramas are embeddable (just like you embed youtube videos)
  • small and large resolution views, view on black or view on white

Upload limits

  • source panorama image can go up to 8000×4000, but it is effectively ‘rescaled to 5000×2500 for smooth panorama preview’;

Self-hosted panorama viewer

If you can afford to pay for hosting, you may choose to host images and a Flash-based or Java-based panorama viewer yourself. There are many choices. Some spherical panorama viewers I am aware of are:

  • pan0 (open source, the same viewer which is used on pan0.net; Flash)
  • krPano (90€, Flash, comes with tools for Windows, Mac and Linux; there is an option to order also a panorama viewer for iPhone)
  • Pano2VR (from 71€ to 180€, Flash, comes with tools for Windows, Mac and Linux)
  • ptviewer (open source, Java, an example of site using it)

Things not to use

Microsoft Photosynth uses Silverlight, and works only on Windows desktops; not very good for web, because cannot be viewed on Linux and many mobile devices. Installation of Silverlight on Mac is not always working as expected (according to forums).

Quicktime VR, it is not supported in the newer versions of Quicktime anymore (see Last nail in the coffin). It is a dead proprietary format.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Frankly, if you can't view my work on Linux, I don't care. Do you know what percentage of the general population of internet users actually uses Linux? Not considering web servers or hosting boxes, but actual users. \$\endgroup\$
    – dpollitt
    Jun 7, 2011 at 20:33
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    \$\begingroup\$ @dpollitt — Frankly, I don't care if anyone views your shots at all. User demographics may differ; for Wikipedia in May 2011, iOS users amount for 3.93%, Linux + Android for 2.75%; so approximately 6.68% of visitors are not able to view Silverlight at all. Given that there are 2 billion internet users worldwide, it corresponds to up to 133 million people; or 25 million in Europe; or 32.5 millions in both Americas. \$\endgroup\$
    – sastanin
    Jun 7, 2011 at 23:05
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    \$\begingroup\$ Well, if you are going to group in iOS and even Android, I would argue that Flash isn't an option either. Try visiting pan0 on an Android :-) I just wouldn't worry about Linux users for the most part. PC, Mac, and maybe some Mobile usage. But if we are talking about a 10k pixel wide pano - Mobile isn't going make much sense anyways. \$\endgroup\$
    – dpollitt
    Jun 8, 2011 at 3:24
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    \$\begingroup\$ @dpollitt — It's your own personal decision, which is irrelevant to the question and to my answer. Choosing some technologies locks millions of people out. Choosing the others makes the content more accessible. What's important, there are solutions which allow to target all major desktop and mobile platforms, e.g. krpano.com/iphone (surely, not 10k wide on iPhone, but 1280x4=5k wide on iPad is OK; and their Flash player works on Android too, though with optimizations); In the future I expect to see some WebGL-based panorama viewers which work anywhere. \$\endgroup\$
    – sastanin
    Jun 8, 2011 at 8:07
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I would take a look at Gigapan. Not only do they have hardware and software to create very large panoramas, but they also offer a free photo sharing and upload option.

One of my favorite examples of the Gigapan software in use is of: President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address by David Bergman . This image is 1.47 gigapixels for example.

Other options you might want to look at include:

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Gigapan seems to be otherwise good but my panorama pixel (10390 x 1723) count is under their 50M limit. \$\endgroup\$
    – Petteri H
    Jun 6, 2011 at 13:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ I have posted panoramas that were under the gigapixel limit, I just resized the image in photoshop to hit the minimum. \$\endgroup\$
    – dpollitt
    Jun 6, 2011 at 14:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ 1) Microsoft Photosynth is a Silverlight-based solution, it doesn't work on Linux, Mac, and many mobile devices, not a good choice for web; 2) Quicktime VR is practically a dead proprietary format which is not supported in the newer versions of Quicktime (link); 3) custom flash viewers are indeed well suitable for panorama viewing on the web; pan0.net (open source), krpano (90€), pano2vr (70€) to name some; I hope that some new HTML5/Javascript based tools will appear too. \$\endgroup\$
    – sastanin
    Jun 7, 2011 at 10:48
  • \$\begingroup\$ There are also Java-based panorama viewers, e.g. ptviewer. An example of the panoramas' site using it: pano.ica-net.it/en/default.htm \$\endgroup\$
    – sastanin
    Jun 7, 2011 at 10:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ @jetxee - Yes I outlined Gigapan as my preferred method, but I still wanted to include others such as Photosynth, Quicktime(which is still widely found all over the internet), etc. \$\endgroup\$
    – dpollitt
    Jun 7, 2011 at 20:35
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You can also host them on your own web, with zooming capabilities from Zoomify or krPano.

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I've created a photo gallery w/ panorama lightbox.

You can try it by clicking on a panorama in this gallery: http://shuw.github.com/photos

To add a similar gallery to your page follow the instructions here: https://github.com/shuw/flickfastr.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ What are the advantages with panorama lightbox? \$\endgroup\$
    – Johan Karlsson
    Oct 8, 2012 at 11:26

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