Free 360° photo & panorama viewer online
View any equirectangular 360° photo right in your browser — drag to look around, scroll or pinch to zoom, step into VR, or export a video. No app, no account, no upload.
🔒 Your photos stay in your browser — nothing is uploaded to our servers.
How to view a 360° photo online
Free360Viewer is a free 360° panorama viewer that runs in your browser. There is no app to install, no account to create and nothing to upload: pick a 360° photo and you are looking around it a second later, on a laptop, a phone or a VR headset.
On a desktop or laptop
- Press Choose a 360° photo, drag a file onto the viewer, or paste an image from the clipboard with Ctrl/Cmd+V.
- Click and drag to look around, scroll to zoom in and out, and press Fullscreen for an edge-to-edge view.
- Autorotate starts a slow pan, Reset view returns to the starting direction, and Screenshot saves exactly what you see as a PNG.
On a phone or tablet
- Open the page in Safari or Chrome, tap Choose a 360° photo and pick one from your camera roll.
- Swipe to look around and pinch to zoom.
- Tap Gyro to look around by moving the phone; iOS asks once for motion permission.
From a link
Photos that are already online open directly: put the image address after free360viewer.com/?url= and share that link. The viewer remembers the direction you were facing, so a link opened by a friend shows the same view. Photos hosted on Orbix360, your own site, or as direct links from cloud storage all work.
Supported formats and sizes
The viewer opens JPEG, PNG and WebP panoramas, plus anything else your browser can decode, including AVIF in current browsers. HEIC photos from iPhone need converting to JPEG first, because browsers cannot decode them.
There is no file-size limit and no upload, so there is nothing to time out. Very large photos are downscaled on your device to the largest texture your graphics hardware supports: usually 16K on a desktop GPU, 8K on a recent phone and 4K on older devices. A standard 5.7K or 8K camera photo displays at full quality on most hardware.
- Equirectangular 2:1 (for example 5760×2880 or 8192×4096): the full sphere; renders exactly as the camera captured it.
- Square 1:1: treated as a stereoscopic top/bottom pair and shown in 3D. Use the 3D toggle if it is really a mono image.
- Other ratios (phone panoramas, 180° photos) are wrapped onto the sphere as-is, so they look stretched; a true 360° camera file looks right.
What is an equirectangular 360° photo?
A 360° photo captures everything around the camera: every direction, above and below. To store that sphere in an ordinary image file it is flattened into a rectangle exactly twice as wide as it is tall, in the same way a world map flattens the globe. That layout is called equirectangular. Viewed as a flat picture it looks warped, with the sky and floor stretched across the top and bottom edges; a 360° viewer wraps it back onto the inside of a sphere and puts you at the centre, and the distortion disappears.
Equirectangular photos come from 360° cameras such as Insta360, Ricoh Theta, GoPro Max and Trisio, from the Google Street View app, from renders in Blender, 3ds Max, V-Ray, Unreal and Unity, and from AI skybox generators. Phone panorama modes capture only a strip of the sphere, which is why they look stretched in a full 360° viewer.
Read the full guide to equirectangular images, including how to tell whether a file is one and how to fix common problems.
View 360° photos in VR
VR headsets
On a headset with a WebXR browser, such as Meta Quest or Pico, open this page in the headset browser, load a photo and press VR. The panorama fills your view at full scale and follows your head. No sideloading, no app store.
Google Cardboard and phone VR
On a phone, VR switches to a split-screen stereo view with gyroscope tracking. Drop the phone into a Google Cardboard or any similar viewer and look around by turning your head. Unlike most web viewers this works on iPhone as well as Android.
Stereoscopic 3D 360° photos
A stereoscopic 360° photo stores two full panoramas, one for each eye, usually stacked top and bottom in a single square image. In VR each eye receives its own view, which gives real depth to the scene. Cameras like the Insta360 EVO, Vuze and Kandao QooCam capture this format, and 3D renderers can produce it. Square images are detected as stereo automatically; the 3D top/bottom button lets you override the detection either way.
Screenshots and social video export
Screenshot saves the exact framing on screen as a PNG, handy for picking a thumbnail or a still for a listing.
Export video turns a 360° photo into a short video that social feeds can play. Choose square 1080×1080 for Instagram and X or landscape 1920×1080 for YouTube and TikTok, pick 5, 8 or 10 seconds, and the viewer renders a smooth looping pan as an MP4 on your device. The share step pre-fills a caption that links back to the interactive 360° view, so people who see the clip can look around the full photo themselves.
Private by design
Photos you pick, drop or paste are decoded and rendered entirely on your device. They are never uploaded, never stored and never seen by anyone else. Close the tab and they are gone. That makes the viewer safe for unreleased property listings, client work and personal photos.
Photos opened from a web address are fetched by your browser directly from their host. If that host does not allow cross-site reads, a small same-origin proxy streams the bytes through so the viewer can display them; it keeps nothing. Screenshots and video export run on your device too.
Beyond viewing: make a virtual tour
One 360° photo is a view. Several linked together are a virtual tour, and that is what Orbix360, the company behind this viewer, is built for. A free Orbix360 account lets you upload 360° and 180° photos, connect them with navigation hotspots, add text hotspots and music, and share the result on social media, by email or as a link that works on phones, desktops and VR headsets. Paid plans add your own logo, a link back to your website, privacy controls, iframe embeds and larger uploads; see the plans.
Press Sign up free below a loaded photo and that photo becomes your first tour, ready to extend.
Requirements and technical notes
- Browser: any current Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox with WebGL enabled. No plug-ins.
- Headset VR: a WebXR-capable browser (Meta Quest Browser, Pico Browser, Wolvic). Cardboard mode needs only a phone with motion sensors.
- Gyroscope: requires a secure (HTTPS) page; iOS asks for motion permission once per session.
- Large photos: downscaled to your GPU's maximum texture size; Safari and Firefox on older hardware may cap at 8K.
- Video export: MP4 needs Chrome, Edge or Safari (WebCodecs); Firefox produces WebM.
- Screenshots of photos opened from a link need a host that allows cross-origin reads; photos from your device always work.
Frequently asked questions
Is this 360° viewer really free?
Yes. There is no account to create, no watermark on the viewer, no upload and no file-size cap. The viewer is a free tool from Orbix360; if you later want to host photos or build a virtual tour, Orbix360 has a free plan for that too.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. Photos you choose, drop or paste are decoded and displayed entirely in your browser and never leave your device. A photo opened from a web address is fetched by your browser directly; if its host blocks cross-site reads, a small proxy streams the bytes through without storing them.
What is an equirectangular image?
An equirectangular image is a full sphere flattened into a rectangle twice as wide as it is tall (2:1), the way a world map flattens the globe. Every 360° camera saves this format, and a 360° viewer wraps it back onto the inside of a sphere so you can look around from the centre.
What formats and sizes are supported?
JPEG, PNG and WebP, plus any other image your browser can decode (AVIF in current browsers). There is no file-size limit: very large photos are downscaled on your device to the largest texture your graphics hardware supports, typically 8K or 16K on the long edge. HEIC files need converting to JPEG first.
Can I view 360° photos on my phone without an app?
Yes. Open free360viewer.com in Safari or Chrome, tap Choose a 360° photo and pick one from your camera roll. Swipe to look around, pinch to zoom, or turn on Gyro and look around by moving the phone.
Does it work with a VR headset or Google Cardboard?
Yes. On a headset with a WebXR browser such as Meta Quest, the VR button opens an immersive view. On a phone, VR switches to split-screen Cardboard mode with gyroscope tracking, including on iPhone.
Can I view Insta360, Ricoh Theta or GoPro Max photos here?
Yes. Export or stitch the photo in the camera's own app so you have a standard equirectangular JPEG, then open that file here. Raw dual-fisheye files straight off the camera need stitching first.
Why does my photo look stretched, mirrored or cut off?
Almost always because the image is not a 2:1 equirectangular photo: a phone panorama covers only part of the sphere, a square image is treated as 3D top/bottom, and an unstitched camera file shows two circles. Check the 3D top/bottom toggle, and export a full equirectangular image from the camera app.
Can I view a 3D (stereoscopic) 360° photo?
Yes. Stereoscopic photos stored as a top/bottom stack are detected automatically from their square shape and shown with real depth in VR. The 3D top/bottom button switches the interpretation if the detection gets it wrong.
How do I turn a 360° photo into a video for social media?
Load the photo, press Export video, pick square (1080×1080) or landscape (1920×1080) and a length of 5 to 10 seconds. The viewer renders a smooth looping pan as an MP4 you can post to X, Instagram or TikTok, with a caption that links back to the interactive 360° view.
How do I embed a 360° photo on my website?
Open a photo that is hosted at a public URL, press Share & embed, choose a size and copy the iframe snippet into any page that accepts HTML. The embed shows the same viewer with drag, zoom, gyroscope and VR, facing the direction you chose.
How do I make a virtual tour from several 360° photos?
Create a free Orbix360 account with the Sign up free button. The photo you are viewing becomes your first tour; add more photos, connect them with navigation hotspots, and share the tour with a link.
What's new
- Sep 2026 — Share & embed panel: copy a link or a resizable iframe that opens facing your current view.
- Aug 2026 — Export video: render a looping MP4 of any 360° photo for X, Instagram and TikTok.
- Aug 2026 — Open photos straight from a link with free360viewer.com/?url=…
- Aug 2026 — Sign up with your photo: the picture you are viewing becomes your first Orbix360 tour.
- Aug 2026 — Fixed mirrored rendering; drag look-around now matches the direction of the photo.
- Jul 2026 — VR headset mode via WebXR and split-screen Google Cardboard mode, including iPhone.
- Jul 2026 — Stereoscopic top/bottom 3D support with automatic detection and a manual toggle.
- Jul 2026 — Autorotate, reset view, screenshot, fullscreen and gyroscope controls.
Free360Viewer is built by Orbix360. Questions or a photo that doesn't display? Get in touch.
