After three days of shooting, ten thousand photos taken, and a huge amount of work, the London 80 Gigapixel Panorama is finished and online…
Press and bloggers: Please download the The Press Release and the media package!
It is the largest 360° ever made to date… Be sure to zoom in all the way!
If you want to publish anything about this image in your blog, newspaper, or anywhere else, here is The Press Release. If you want some screenshots / images from this panorama, you can download the media package.
This image is, I would say, the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced as a photographer, and the finished product is certainly one of the highlights of my photographic career. That said, it’s far from perfect, and those of you who want to seek our imperfections in the image will have no problem doing so. (To save those folks the trouble, I have chronicled some of the problems and shortcomings of the image in another post.)
If you want, you can also read a general FAQ about the making of the London 80 Gigapixel image.
You can also read about how to make panoramas yourself. It’s easy 😉
As we’ve mentioned on the Gigapixel Page, we will have three competitions in conjunction with the release of this image.
The first two competitions “treasure hunt” type games, and will require you to find stuff in the image, and be quick. If you are, you can win either some camera / computer bags from Crumpler, or a 27 inch LCD Monitor from Fujitsu! You can read about these treasure hunts over on the Gigapixel Page.
The third competition, launching in beginning of December, is something new, and I’m not sure it’s even been done before, which is really exciting! It is a storytelling competition. Using the London Gigapixel image, you’ll be able to write your own story, using parts of the London Gigapixel image itself – zoom in (or out) on any part of the image, put a sentence (or more) there, and repeat, until you have a story. Publish this story to the Web; you and your friends can vote on the best stories, and win more than $3000 in holiday-related prizes from Urban Adventures and Homeaway.
Last but not least, please read my Special Thanks – I was only able to make this image (and learn how I might do it) because lots of people have helped me!
360Cities Blog 
Holy Cow ! Awesome !!! If you knew someone in London…maybe you can find them here !
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bravo !! incredible pano ! ;0)
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If Streetview has to blurr faces and registration plates on cars, what do you think you are doing here!
Amazing achievement, but are you allowed to do this? I can read the reg plates and parking fine details on a windscreen. Detail is frightening.
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hi John,
Streetview doesn’t “have to” blur anything (except in one or two countries, maybe) – they do it because it is good PR, and streetview is not intended to be art – it is a navigational tool primarily.
From our FAQ:
“I can read license plates and see faces! Isn’t that illegal?
The last time we checked, it is perfectly legal to practice the art of photography in most places on planet Earth. We have blurred out the faces of identifiable children, because as we understand it, it is a tremendous crime to photograph and publish images of children without the consent of their parents. We also blurred out one “naughty bit”.”
https://blog.360cities.net/london-gigapixel-faq/
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Hi Jeff,
wonderful picture and very clear with very much details.
But it is not the largest pano in the world, maybe it is the largest 360/180 pano. The largest pano i know is from Rio de Janeiro and has mor than 150 Gigapix (but it is not so clear as yours): http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/58857/
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Hi Hans-Dieter,
Yes, computer scientists are able to stitch together 10,000 or 1,000,000 blurry photos 😉
I wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post about them already.
https://blog.360cities.net/gigapixel-charlatans/
Greg Downing of xrez.com, in the comments of that image, compared his own 5 gigapixel image of the same view – the resolution appears to be about the same. So I think we can discount this image from the annals of fame 😉
cheers,
Jeffrey
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fabulous
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I’ve lived in London and miss it terribly- this is so wonderful to look at my beloved city. What a beautiful technical feat! Thank you.
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This is a fabulous achievement and I look forward to spending time looking through all of it.
However, I find it counter intuitive to use, particularly after being used to dragging Google maps and streetview around. Please could you offer the option to reverse the direction of clicking and dragging up, down, left and right. Many thanks.
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awesome work!
*boththumbsup*
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>> We also blurred out one “naughty bit” <<
Heh. Only one, in the whole thing?
And wow – that means you had to manually check nearly 600 square meters of photos?
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The details are amazing, I could not find pictures of cats or pigeons on rooftops which is very different if it were my a local city in Malaysia. Hmm, I need to explore more, maybe I am just not finding it.
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Hi Jeffrey. Dunno if you were commenting “tongue in cheek” when you wrote: “it is a tremendous crime to photograph and publish images of children without the consent of their parents.”
That is not the case at all. For an easy to understand explanation, go to http://www.dg28.com/blog/opinion/no_law.htm
PS Absolutely fantastic work
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Hi Tom,
Thank you very much for the link.
Jeffrey
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Dear Jeffrey Martin and collegues: Great, great great – you and your team have done a wonderful job and we’d like to say “Contratulations”.
After we’d heard we published a german article about your giant panorama. All german readers are invited to hear the story under http://blog.fotoquip.de/8-000-fotos-von-london-sind-das-groste-panorama-der-welt.html
Greetings
Sascha
FOTOQUIP Team
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thats amazing, conrulations and keep going… from Guadalajara,México.
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Wow, that’s amazing work – after having shot more than 3000 panoramic images for our panoramic cityguide, I know what I’m talking about – this London image blew me away. And I envy your work conditions – three days for one shot, in the hotel business we get like a two hour slot for ten rooms ; )
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Lived in London all my life and never seen anything like it. Just amazing!!
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This is one of the best things I have ever seen on the web. The ability to select a barely visible building in the distance and zoom in so close without losing clarity and detail is amazing. Well done on achieving such an incredible feat!
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Thanks for all your efforts, Jeffrey.
I remember seeing a panorama similar to this last year, I think from somewhere in Germany…
But this is far superior, not just because I’m British born & bred and lived 3 years in the North of London, but because it gives a sense of direction and relative location to all the famous sights we’ve all heard of but never had the time to explore!
As an Electronic Engineer I was fascinated to explore the array of communications equipment on the Telecom Tower. I’m sure that I’ll spend all my spare time exploring the capital thanks to your excellent image.
Where will you be next? Please let me know if you intend to do Istanbul in Turkey…
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Utterly understand what your stance in this matter. Though I would disagree on some of the finer details, I feel you probably did an superior job explaining it. Certain beats having to research it on my own. Thanks
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Fantastic work!
Might I ask for the total size of the final picture? I must be some GB, not?
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amazing
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hey u really changed my mind 🙂 i like this one, thanks so much,,,
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