LizardQ 360 Desktop Viewer, Free - for Windows and Mac

[craig]

This is my third review of free 360 desktop viewers.

The first two reviews:

1. Panorado - Windows only
2. Simple Panorama Viewer - Windows only

My objective is to identify features of 360 image viewers to identify features that make a great 360 viewer.

These are the feature categories:

• image viewing experience (zoom capability, shimmer or distortion when image is panned, image distortion such as straight lines)
• image editing - metadata and other enhancements, bulk processing
• image management - group images, display sequence
• THETA-specific features (camera communication, firmware update)

Today, I focus on LizardQ Viewer. The site indicates that it is free as in beer.

The viewer does not have adjustments for the 360 view. The straight lines may show more distortion compared to Panorado. There is a shimmer on rotate compared to Panorado and Simple Panorama Viewer.

It has the largest zoom capability.

Compare to the max zoom of the official THETA desktop app.

The viewer can save a cropped image as a non-360 image.

There is an overlay with additional information on the viewer.

The overlay can be toggled.

LizardQ Viewer supports these file formats:
RADIANCE (.HDR), OpenEXR (.EXR) or JPEG.

Unfortunately, I didn’t test the EXR features.

It seems like the Tonemap menu is enabled if I load a .HDR or EXE file.

I’ll try and take a bracket set and produce an EXR file in the future.

[jcasman]

@craig

Today, I focus on LizardQ Viewer. The site indicates that it is free as in beer.

Thanks for pointing out this viewer and posting your test results here. I just downloaded it for Mac. I’m on a MacBook Air (M1, 2020) running macOS Monterey (version 12.5.1).

I had a standard security issue with macOS saying that the developer was not recognized.

In System Preferences, in Security and Privacy, you can click Open Anyway.

You have a range of View options.

Here’s an image, taken in Crissy Field in San Francisco, with the Show info option. It displays Cursor (position on the image), Color, View (orientation), Size, FOV, F-Stop, Zoom, and FPS.

• The zoom can go up to 800% which does not seem particularly usable
• FPS seems like a strange inclusion for a static image

I would like to be able to work on multiple images at the same time. In other words, open up, say, 10 images, and be able to use LizardQ to move between and view all of them. I believe that function is not available.

[craig]

Panorado has the most extensive grouping and most features of the viewers I tested.

Panorado - Free 360 Image Viewer for Windows

This is another evaluation of 360 image viewers on desktop computers. I previously reviewed Simple Panorama Viewer which had some advantages over the official RICOH THETA Basic App which runs on Windows and Mac. Today, I’m looking at Panorado, which only runs on Windows. It has many more features than the RICOH THETA desktop viewer, including the ability to view image location on a map using embedded GPS coordinates, editing and viewing the image metadata, grouping images into collections, bu…

LizardQ has a nice feature with EXR and HDR files which I was not able to test. If you have or can create an EXR or HDR file, then it would nice to test the tonemap feature.

When I tested LizardQ with a standard JPEG image, the Tonemap was greyed out. I believe it needs the file to be a .HDR or .EXR format.

The Tonemap adjustment could be the biggest feature advantage of LizardQ compared to the other viewers.