How to stitch a DJI 360° panorama from the original photos

1. Find the original panorama photos

When the drone shoots a Sphere, 180° or Wide panorama, it saves the separate shots on the drone’s microSD card, in the DCIM → PANORAMA folder, with one numbered folder per panorama. Copy the whole folder of the panorama you want to your computer. (On some models the originals are only kept when the app’s “save original panorama photos” option is on — check your camera settings before a flight that matters.)

Don’t use the copies on your phone: those are the small previews and the app’s stitched result, not the full-resolution originals.

2. Shoot a sphere that stitches cleanly

• Calm air. Wind moves the drone between shots, which shows up as seams and doubled edges.
• Altitude. Higher up (around 50–120 m, where allowed) there’s less nearby detail to cause parallax errors.
• Nothing moving close by. Cars, people and waves change between frames; far-away movement matters less.
• Even light. The sun in frame is fine, but very bright sky next to deep shadow is harder to blend.
• The 3× camera (Air 3S and other dual-camera drones) shoots many more photos — over a hundred for a full sphere — so the panorama is far more detailed, but it takes longer to fly and to stitch.

3. Stitch it in your browser

1. Open the panorama stitcher.
2. Drop all the photos from one panorama folder. Keep the original file names — they tell the stitcher the shooting order.
3. Choose 360° sphere and a size: 8K suits most screens; 12K is worth it for a 3× sphere if your computer has plenty of memory.
4. Press Stitch panorama. DJI photos carry the gimbal angles, so they’re placed on the sphere first and then fine-tuned by matching the detail they share.
5. Look around the result in the built-in 360° viewer, then download the JPG.

Everything runs on your computer — the photos are never uploaded — which is also why a 100+ photo sphere takes a few minutes.

4. Why the top is a smooth sky

A drone can’t photograph straight up past its own propellers, so every drone sphere has a hole at the top. The stitcher fills it with a smooth gradient that matches the real sky at the edge — the same approach DJI’s app uses — so it looks natural in a 360° viewer.

5. Share it

The stitched JPG already contains 360° (GPano) metadata, so Facebook and Google Photos show it as an interactive panorama. If you edit it later in Lightroom or Photoshop and it suddenly appears flat, see why Facebook shows a 360° photo flat.

For Instagram, which doesn’t do 360°, turn the sphere into a tiny planet — a square image that works well in a feed.

Frequently asked questions