14 DAY TRIAL // Picasa is showcasing an interesting feature which, in essence, enables you to flip through an album by dragging with the mouse. While this may be a convenient way of moving from one photo to the other, it’s also a great way of showcasing 360 degree product photos. Now Google is releasing an open source photo viewer, the Swivel Viewer, that does the same thing.
“A while back, we noticed that lots of sites were starting to show 360 degree views of their products. So a few months ago we added a feature to Picasa Web Albums that lets you flip through the photos in an album in ‘Full Screen View’ or ‘Slideshow’ mode by dragging left and right on the current photo. This works especially well if you put an object on a turntable, but it also works fine for other albums, like our featured shots from the 2010 Winter games,” Jason Holt, from the Google Street View Team, wrote.
To see the feature in action go to any Picasa album and switch the Full Screen mode to on. Clicking on an image and dragging it left or right will load the next or the previous photo in the album. Continuing to drag will load the next one and so on. It makes it easy to flip through an album, but it also works great for 360 degree product photos. The embeddable photo viewer also supports the feature, so it works for any albums you may have posted to your blog.
But if you want the same thing for images you host yourself, Google provides this too with the Swivel Viewer. The open-source project, hosted on Google Code, provides an embeddable album viewer that supports zooming and, importantly, panning making it ideal for 360 degree product photos. And if that isn’t enough, Google is also showing you how to take 360 photos and how to build your own ‘object scanner.’