How to Take Good 360° Degree Photos

ThingLink Team November 19, 2025

An Introduction to 360° Photography for Beginners

360 degree images or photospheres capture the entire surrounding environment in a single shot, allowing viewers to look around freely. They are ideal for travel, real estate, events, virtual tours, and immersive creative projects, for presenting any environment in virtual reality headsets, or to explore via desktop or mobile device for a more immersive experience.

In this blog, we’ll cover:

• Choosing your camera and other equipment
• The basics of 360° photography
• Shooting Indoors vs. Outdoors
• Editing 360° Photos
• Basics of 360° Videography
• Editing 360° Videos

Choosing a 360 Degree Camera and Other Equipment

360° Camera

Pick a model based on your needs – from simple point-and-shoot devices to professional multi-lens setups. Key features include image quality, low-light performance, stabilization, and resolution. Well-established brands you may want to consider include Insta360 and Ricoh Theta

Accessories

• Sturdy monopod that extends to 160 cm (tripods are not recommended as they are too visible in 360° images)
• Spare batteries and memory cards
• Protective case
• Memory card (128 GB or above; UHS-I microSD cards with a V30 or higher speed class and exFAT format)
• External microphone for video, if supported (e.g., Rode Wireless GO)
  

Basics of 360° Photography

A 360° image is created by stitching together photos from multiple lenses. Stitching is usually done in the phone app used to control the camera’s settings and capture images.

Core principles

• Keep the camera stable.
• Place the camera close to the object or in the center of the space you’re trying to capture.
• Start with auto settings; adjust ISO and exposure manually as you advance.
• Lighting affects every angle, so help the stitching software by prioritizing even, overall illumination.
  

Shooting Indoors vs. Outdoors

Indoors

• Avoid dim lighting – add lights or use a camera with good low-light performance.
• Watch out for mirrors and reflective surfaces.
• Position the camera centrally for balanced depth and perspective.
• Some lights can cause flicker in images (especially with long exposure times) and in videos. Flicker is often caused by a mismatch between your camera’s shutter speed and the frequency of artificial lighting, or by inconsistent exposure in time-lapses. To fix this, adjust your camera settings (e.g., match shutter speed to the light frequency).
  

Outdoors

• Avoid pointing the lens directly at harsh sunlight to reduce flare.
• Early morning or late afternoon light works best.
• Secure the camera well, especially in windy conditions.
  

Editing 360° Photos

Editing is done using the camera app or with specialized software.

Typical steps include

• Basic adjustments (brightness, contrast, color temperature)
• Fixing stitching errors
• Light retouching to remove unwanted elements

The equirectangular projection can make editing 360° images tricky, as standard photo-editing apps don’t let you view the top and bottom areas properly. You can still make basic adjustments normally, but for viewing and editing in full 360°, you need specialized software. Affinity Photo offers excellent tools for editing 360° images.

Taking a 360° Photo with your Phone

Whilst it is not possible to take a true photosphere with a smartphone, ThingLink have created a user-friendly way to convert any panoramic image, taken on any android phone, iphone, or other phone camera, into a 360° image. Originally designed to replace the popular but deprecated Google street view app photo function, the Pano to 360 by ThingLink feature uses AI to stitch the image end to end, and fill in the areas at the top and bottom of image. Simply upload the jpeg or png file to the converter (on desktop or mobile), press convert, and your final image is ready to download.

Basics of 360° Videography

360 video is more demanding than still photography.

Key considerations for 360° Videos

• Use a high resolution (5.7K or higher recommended). Please note that you need to downscale the video to 3840×1920 in post production to upload to ThingLink. 
• Keep the camera steady with a monopod, tripod, or built-in stabilization.
• Position the camera close to the person speaking for better audio. Avoid windy conditions and environments with heavy background noise.
• Prepare for large file sizes and longer processing times.

Editing 360° Videos

Editing is typically done in the camera’s software or a 360°-capable video editor.

Main steps

• Stitching and stabilization, usually done in a phone app or the camera manufacturer’s desktop application
• Color correction and lighting adjustments
• Cuts and transitions designed for immersive viewing (avoid sudden changes)
• Exporting in the correct codec and resolution for different platforms. For ThingLink export, set the video resolution to 3840 × 1920 and bitrate to 15–20 Mbps.
• For editing 360° videos, you can try DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Final Cut Pro X.