I like to ride my bicycle

Took Blackbirb out for a little spin through the woods yesterday. Despite only being a 22 mile ride it was quite intense with a lot of climbing up some pretty steep hills.

I used the ride as a test-run of my new Theta V 360 cam and for the most part things went well. When I got home and tried to add the photospheres to Google Maps though, I discovered a minor problem: the camera didn't record any geotag data in the photo, because it apparently lacks a built-in GPS receiver.

"No problem," I says to myself, brimming with unsupported confidence, "I'll just use the GPX file my Garmin recorded to tag the photos and upload them from my desktop!"

Problem #1: My Garmin GPS records 'fit' files, not 'gpx' files. Thankfully there's a lot of converters around so this was relatively easy to fix.

Problem #2: You can't upload photospheres from the web UI of maps... like, what?

After a lot of hair pulling (and I don't have much hair to pull) I finally managed to take a roundabout route through Google Photos to get the GPS-updated photos back within reach of my mobile device so I could add them.


The quality isn't exactly mind blowing for the still photospheres but my goal long term isn't to do single exposures, which I could do with better quality by doing a manual pano with my phone camera, but to capture whole street view runs of trails that are lacking coverage. Doing that manually with the phone camera would be a slow, laborious nightmare, whereas with the 360 cam you can just let it record as you walk/bike along.