Using the zoom viewer

See also VR Viewer Help

Many of the panoramas, particularly the large ones, are presented with an interactive "zoom viewer." Alternately there is a large jpeg you can click on.

In the zoom viewer there are many ways to move around. The simplest instructions are:

• Arrow keys for pan around
• Mouse wheel or Shift/CTRL for zoom (The wheel zooms where your mouse is.)
• Right click for menu
• Button in upper right for Fullscreen, ESC to revert
• Toolbar on bottom left has most controls, including VR mode, Gyro mode (tablets/phones,) Fullscreen, Previous/Next pano and the VR Galleries.

Full screen is strongly recommended for the larger panoramas and if you can, get a big screen like a 4K TV to view these. It's worth it to plug your laptop into your 4K TV if you have one.

However, here are some other tricks dragging the mouse.

• You can pan by clicking and dragging with the mouse like google maps. You can also right click and toggle the mouse drag mode. In the alternate mode it starts panning to take you to the direction you drag the mouse but keeps going as long as you hold the button down. Some like this more.

Different views

• To access the regular browser jpeg, go back to the thumbnail page and look for the link that gives the dimensions and size in K of the jpeg. Click on the size in kilobytes.
• The display begins with the image filling the height of the window or screen and you can zoom in or pan around. In 360 panoramas you can zoom all the way around as much as you like. If you want to pull back to see the "big picture" which is recommended for many panoramas, select the "Wide View" either from the right-click menu or the Widen button in the toolbar (to the right of the "previous panorama" button.)
• In wide view you can zoom in and out as you like.
• A few images were never prepared for 360 zoom viewing so you may see a disconnect or overlap where they wrap together.

Fun thing to do: Go into fullscreen mode on a big monitor with a 360 degree panorama. Adjust size to fill screen and hold down arrow keys or pan controls and spin around like you were there. You may get dizzy.

Don't forget to zoom in on your favourite points of interest.

Virtual Reality Headsets

If you have a virtual reality headset that supports the WebVR/WebXR protocol, you can use the browser in that headset to go to all the panoramas. You can see the view, often in 360 degrees in VR at whatever resolution your headset has. It can feel like you are standing where I was for the photo.

You may need to give permission to allow the site to enter VR on your headset. Not all my panoramas are 360, so there may be a gap or a join. In addition, I rarely shoot the full sphere, so most panoramas will not show you the sky above you or ground below you, but they show all the interesting stuff.

See the VR Viewer Help

More Info

See the FAQ