360Cities.net

Hi! I decided to take some time this week to figure out what program was best for my needs to share my 360 media. Today I’m focusing on the 360 Cities website. 

I used the Ricoh Theta SC Hatsune Miku to capture my photos/videos and a Macbook Pro to edit them. 

Initial Thoughts

360cities is a browser based publishing platform that allows individuals to upload panoramic images, videos, and artistic VR creations to the large community who frequent the site. The application is available on desktop and mobile (though I only tested it on desktop) and is fast and reactive. There are a number of interesting features available at the free tier as well as their various paid ones. 

One interesting note is that 360cities claims you can earn money from licensing your images posted to the 360cities site. There are a couple tiers for accounts, but after looking at the forum there does seem to be a fair number of people using the “Forever Free” tier (like myself).

Because 360cities is a web browser based application, it is simpler to use than a lot of downloadable applications. Your images must be edited before being dropped into 360cities as it is a sharing platform, not an editing one. You also can batch upload images, but you have to run an FTP program to use it. 

The steps are fairly simple: upload, write a title and a description, pin a location, and upload. The image upload was fairly quick, as was the upload to the 360cities server. 

You can see your published images with a map as well as well as denote if a photo or video promotes a business. 

The application itself is fairly straightforward, but the real value clearly comes from spending time exploring other user’s uploads or having your own viewed. One thing about 360Cities is that they are strict with uploads to their publicly listed showcase. The criteria for panoramas submitted for public listing include seamless edges, a level horizon, no exposure errors, and more. If you want your image to be accepted, you must meet all of the criteria, leading to a high quality, interesting public showcase.

Embedding on your personal site reqires you to whitelist the desired URL. If you would like to view my 360Cities panoramas, you can do so here and here.

Here are my pros and cons for the 360cities application:

Concluding Thoughts

In general, I think that the 360cities site is a good choice if you have one off images that you would like to share with a larger audience than your personal website gets. It seems like some of the more popular images have tens of thousands of views, so if you have an image that seems of particular quality, it could be a nice place to push your work.