You upload a spherical photo to Facebook and instead of a sphere you can look around in, you get a stretched strip. There is one reason for it: the file lost the metadata that tells Facebook it is a panorama. Below I show three ways to put that metadata back. The first one runs in your browser and needs no installation, the other two are desktop apps, useful when you have more photos to fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook does not recognise a panorama by how it looks. It recognises it by a piece of information stored inside the file. If that information is there, the service shows an interactive sphere that the reader turns with the mouse or by tilting the phone. If it is missing, you get an ordinary photo with odd proportions, something like a flattened globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The metadata usually disappears somewhere along the way, not when you take the shot. It gets wiped by editing, resizing, compression, an export from a graphics app or by sending the file through a messenger. A spherical camera writes it correctly, but one step in an editor is enough to lose it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n