Total Geek Path

EXIFTOOL & EXIFTOOLGUI

This is a tool for rocket scientists only… OK, I’m overstating it a bit. While these tools allow you to FULLY manipulate the metadata in ANY image, there is a significant learning curve. The real tool that does the work is EXIFTOOL. EXIFTOOLGUI is a program interface that is supposed to make the base tool easier to use. You have to have both to use GUI.

EXIFTOOLGUI is no longer supported. It sort of still works. But, to add the metadata we want to add you end up using the direct command line utility built into GUI. One might as well skip that GUI learning curve and just use the command line utility EXIFTOOL.

To use TOOL you need to know the command:

exiftool -ProjectionType=”equirectangular” [path/filename.extent]

Executing the command injects the metadata tag into the image file’s data section. Done.

The program comes named exiftool(-k).exe. Rename it to exiftool.exe. The (-k) version is used for drag and drop in Windows. However the programmer implemented that feature, the other command line instructions will not work until the ‘k’ is removed. So, I suggest you make a copy, change copy’s name, and use the copy.

The (-k) version prints out (screen) the file’s metadata. You have to get the ‘k’ out of the name to use the TOOL for adding meta data. Did I already say that…

Some people at Flickr recommend adding these tags.

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

I found the last two sufficient.

The Facebook page, Injecting Metadata, linked to above provides a number of additional EXIFTOOL commands for a number of different style images.

Displaying the Images – Embedding

I see blog sites where the Flickr embed code works just fine for embedding and displaying 360-images. But, not on my site. I probably have a plugin that is conflicting.

Other services offer their own embed coding and methods. In general, they have code that works with any web site.

So, I use a good plugin used by 10,000+ WordPress users, which is WP-VR-View. It installs and we use a short-code to use it. Example codes are:

• [vrview img=”URL for photosphere image”]
• [vrview video=”URL for 360 video .mp4 file”]
• [vrview video=”URL for 360 video .mp4 file” img=”URL for video preview image”]
• [vrview img=”URL for photosphere” pimg=”Optional URL preview photosphere photo for faster load”]
• [vrview img=”URL for photosphere” width=”500″ height=”300″]
  width=”500″ – set width to 500 pixels wide. if you want full/100% width you can use width=”100%”
• [vrview img=”URL for photosphere” stereo=”true”]
  stereo image – default value is false.

Conclusion

The world is moving to a single standard for 360-images. You won’t need to worry about using the correct metadata to designate your image is 360 for YouTube, Facebook, Google, or Flickr. I suspect that is true for all services supporting 360-images.

However, there are two competing standards… isn’t there always? The work around if you run into problems is to add both sets of metadata tags. Those an app doesn’t need are ignored. So, too many tags is a way minor problem.

With this information you can use the images this version of the in progress project viewer’s output.