Support for 360° pictures [Enhancement]

[Rehvaro]

Hello,

First, thank you for maintaining Lychee, I just love it :)

Then: In my opinion, a good feature for Lychee would be to support 360° photos.

Here are my ideas, from what I think is the more important, to the less important:

The first thing I propose is to adapt the way thumbnails works for 360°, by proposing the option to crop the thumbnails to a certain angle/format/position, so we don't have a very large picture in the album gallery (and add an icon to the thumbnail to say "Hey ! I'm 360 !").

The second thing could be to incorporate a 360 viewer to watch and explore a 360° pictures.

Last thing, if I go far, could be to propose a way to watch them with Google Cardboard compatible devices.

I know it's not an easy request and if it's made it won't be tomorrow, but I think it could be useful for people who like to make panoramas.

Thank you for reading

[kamil4]

FYI, I transferred your request to the front end repository since that's where the majority of the work would have to go.

Our current viewer is fairly primitive; it is only capable of displaying still pictures (scaled down if needed) and a few formats of video files. We have been getting requests for enhancements, ranging from zoom/pan, to support for Apple's "live photos". I view your request as belonging to the same group. None of them are what I would consider high priority but I expect that at some point their sheer number will reach a critical mass and then we'll likely make improvements in this area.

If you have any links with resources related to your request (sample files, specs, libraries that implement support for them) I encourage you to add them to this request. In particular, do you know if these 360° pictures can be recognized as such from the code (do they have some particular Exif tag, etc)? Would a generic zoom with provide most of the needed support?

[Rehvaro]

Thanks for your answer.

I agree this is not high priority but I just hope to see them implemented one day. For the resources, I can link this 360 viewer https://github.com/mpetroff/pannellum (with a demo on there website https://pannellum.org/). For the code, detecting if left and right pixels are similar could do the trick. Also, most of the time these files are named with a .vr.jpg .vr.png .vr.something file extension, so it could also be a solution. For your last question, a generic zoom could be an excellent first step, a zoom with the possibility to go left and right, with the picture looping in both direction. It would be less realistic that a player with view distortion but still a good way to view these files.

Thank you,

[d7415]

For the code, detecting if left and right pixels are similar could do the trick.

That won't work. It applies to too many "normal" photos. E.g. many night-time photos.

Also, most of the time these files are named with a .vr.jpg .vr.png .vr.something file extension, so it could also be a solution.

That could work, so long as it's widely enough used.