Straighten a crooked 360 photo

A 360 photo comes out level only when the camera stood perfectly upright. Two or three degrees off is enough: the walls lean, and as you turn around, the horizon climbs on one side of the room and sinks on the other. The usual causes:

• An uneven tripod: one leg shorter than the others, a sloping floor, a thick rug or a loose head.
• The camera's sense of up: the app joins the shots using motion sensors that drift a little as the camera moves, and the photo keeps the error.
• A tilted stick or hand: the camera was held at an angle, so the whole sphere is turned.

Rooms are full of lines that should be vertical: door frames, wall corners, the sides of cupboards. The tool looks at your photo in 8 views around the horizon, finds those lines and works out where true up is. Then it turns the whole sphere until up points straight up again.

Nothing is cropped or stretched: every pixel moves to its new place, at full resolution.

The sliders are the better tool when the photo has no clear vertical lines (a garden, a beach) or leans by more than about 10 degrees. The tool tells you so and opens “Adjust by hand” for you.

Yes. Every 360 photo has a front: the view people see first. Often it is a blank wall, or wherever the camera happened to point. Move “Turn the starting view”, under “Starting view”, and the room turns around you, sideways only, so the horizon stays level.

Stop when what buyers should see first, such as the front door, is straight ahead in the view the photo opened on (if you have dragged around, drag back first). Then download.

The turn is written into the file: your starting view becomes the centre of the photo, where 360 viewers and tours open it by default.

Straightening turns the whole sphere, the floor included, so a tripod patch added first would end up off-centre, no longer right under you. Level the photo here, download it, then cover the tripod in the straight file.

Tripod showing at the bottom? Now that the photo is straight, cover the tripod with a nadir patch.

The straight photo is saved without its GPS location. Before you publish the listing's other photos, remove the GPS location from them too.

• Level the tripod in every room: a bubble level on the tripod head, or the level in your camera's app if it shows one.
• Use the camera's own correction: if your 360 camera's app offers horizon correction (some call it zenith or top and bottom correction), turn it on.
• Keep the stick upright: on a monopod or selfie stick, let the camera hang level instead of leaning it towards the room.
• Check the first room before the rest: when one room leans, the others usually do too.
• No 360 camera: Vistura Capture turns your phone into a 360 camera, in the phone's browser, with nothing to install. Capturing is free; a free account lets you download the photo or add it to a tour.

Not for the levelling. When we checked in October 2026, the top search results for straightening a 360 photo were guides for desktop programs: PTGui, Affinity Photo, Hugin and GIMP.

If your file is already a 360 photo, twice as wide as it is tall, this page levels it in your browser, free, from the room's own vertical lines: nothing to install, the photo stays on your device and the download carries the 360 metadata.