Panoye is a community-driven photo sharing site with a twist: all uploaded images are panoramic, 360° views, and all of them are geo-tagged to show you exactly where the photos were taken on a map of the earth.

I must admit to a certain fondness for panoramic photos and 360° views, which is why I found this site so interesting. Aside from the (decidedly brilliant) concept, and the fact that you need to scroll through the image and/or click into it and drag it around to view it, Panoye feels and behaves much like other photo sharing sites such as Flickr: users can rate and leave comments on images or leave tags that point to interesting features or other information within the images.

Images that you like are easily downloadable (click "show image" and the right-click save background as). You can also subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to be instantly informed of new image uploads and/or subscribe to your favorite Photographers’ RSS feeds and be notified when new images by them become available.

Whats even cooler is that for any image that’s uploaded on Panoye (whether you uploaded it yourself or not) you can obtain a code that enables you to embed it on your site. Check out the following Panorama from Venice, Italy.

Wish list: a search box. Strangely abscent.

For freeware programs that can help you create panoramic images check out Autostitch or (my favorite) Hugin. For a good freeware panoramic image viewer check out Wpanorama.

[Via Appscout].

Go to the Panoye website