Photo Sphere Support on Android

This page provides an overview of support for panoramic photography in Android. These features were first introduced in Android 4.2 with the Photo Sphere camera.

API for viewing photo spheres

For Android applications that wish to display photo spheres in an interactive spherical viewer, Google Play services provides support for this functionality. See the Panorama package reference website for more information.

Photo sphere MIME type

In Android 4.2 we introduced a new vendor specific MIME type to provide differentiation between regular photos and photo spheres that are 360 degrees horizontally. Applications that wish to handle photo spheres of this type should register an intent filter for the following MIME type:

application/vnd.google.panorama360+jpg

The Gallery application's Share menu uses this MIME type for 360 degree photo spheres, so any application that has an intent-filter for this MIME type will be added to this menu for devices running Android 4.2.

For example, the Google Maps application uses this MIME type to allow users to upload 360 degree panoramic images for all Google Maps users to see (a geotag is required in the image for upload).