Cubemap to equirectangular converter
Drop the six faces of a cubemap, or the ZIP or folder of a krpano or Marzipano tour, and get one equirectangular 360 photo with its 360 metadata (GPano XMP). It works the other way too: drop a 360 photo to get its six faces.
Your photo never leaves your device: it is opened and processed in this page, and nothing is uploaded.
Drop the six faces, a ZIP or a tour folder here
or
Six square faces (JPEG, PNG or WebP), a krpano or Marzipano export, or one picture with the faces in a cross. Drop a 2:1 360 photo to get its six faces instead.
What a cubemap is, and why old tours use it
A cubemap keeps a 360 photo as six square pictures, the faces of a cube round the camera: front, right, back, left, up and down. Tour players such as krpano, Marzipano and Pano2VR cut each face into tiles at several sizes, so a tour opens fast and gets sharper as you zoom in. That is why an exported or archived tour often has hundreds of small pictures and no 360 photo. Most 360 viewers and tour software want the other format: one equirectangular photo, twice as wide as it is tall, the format Google documents for 360 photos.
Where to find the faces
- krpano, and the tools that export for it (such as the krpano output of Pano2VR): the tour.xml file and the panos folder. Drop the whole folder or its ZIP; the tool reads tour.xml and lists its rooms; pick one and it puts that room's tiles together at their sharpest size.
- Marzipano: the data.js file and the tiles folder, as Marzipano Tool exports them. Drop the whole folder or its ZIP.
- Six separate faces from a camera, a 3D program or a game engine: files whose names end in front, back, left, right, up and down, or in f, b, l, r, u, d, in posx to negz, or in 0 to 5. Drop the six together.
- One picture with the faces in a cross, 4 squares by 3: up above the front, then left, front, right and back, then down. Drop it on its own.
- Tiles in another program's own layout (3DVista, the HTML5 player of Pano2VR) cannot be put together here. Use the original 360 photo if you still have it, or six face images if the program can save them.
How the tool places the faces
Each face is placed from its file name, and you see the six as an unfolded cube next to a small preview of the 360 photo. If a face is in the wrong place, choose the right picture for it and the two swap. If the top or bottom is turned, as some programs save them, turn it a quarter at a time. A seam in the preview that jumps means a face is still wrong. The photo is four faces wide and two high: 2048 px faces give 8192 x 4096. Faces over 4096 px are reduced, so the largest photo is 16384 x 8192.
What the 360 photo is good for
- Sharing it as 360: the file carries the 360 metadata (GPano XMP) that Google documents for its products and that most 360 viewers look for. Facebook's help says photos from 360 cameras and stitching software become 360 photos when shared from its iPhone or Android app; with this file, check with a first post. Google Maps also needs a compass heading, which this file does not carry.
- A new virtual tour: one 360 photo per room is what most tour software takes, Vistura included (photos up to 25 MB, shown at up to 8192 x 4096).
- Keeping the tour: one file per room is easier to store and to move than folders of tiles.
- Next time, keep the camera's original 360 photos with the tour: an export is made for showing, not for keeping.
Questions
Are my files uploaded?
No. The faces, the ZIP and the export are opened and converted in this page, on your device. Nothing is sent to Vistura or anywhere else, and nothing is kept after you close the page.
Which files work?
Square JPEG, PNG and WebP faces (over 4096 px they are reduced); a ZIP or folder with six faces or with a krpano or Marzipano export; one picture in the 4 by 3 cross; or one 2:1 360 photo up to 16384 x 8192 to cut into faces. Strips of six faces in a row are not read, because programs put the faces in different orders: cut them into six files first. The result is always a JPEG.
A face is in the wrong place or upside down. What do I do?
In the check, choose the right picture for that face: the two faces swap. Turn the top or the bottom a quarter at a time until its edges meet the four sides in the preview. If nothing lines up, the files were probably named in another program's order: try swapping left and right first.
Can I convert equirectangular to cubemap?
Yes. Drop one 2:1 360 photo and download its six faces in a ZIP: square JPEGs a quarter of the photo's width, named the way krpano names them (_f, _r, _b, _l, _u, _d). Dropped back here, they give the photo again.
Does the photo keep its quality?
The faces are used at full size up to 4096 px, and a tiled export is put together from its sharpest complete level. The photo is saved as a high quality JPEG with the 360 metadata and no EXIF data.
Is it really free?
Yes: no account, no email, no watermark and no limit on how many panoramas you convert.
Bring the whole tour into Vistura
Have the whole krpano or Marzipano export? Create a tour in Vistura and drop the export's ZIP into its photo list: each room comes in as a 360 photo, with the links between rooms and the notes. It works on every plan; the free plan has 3 active tours, with Vistura branding.