Born in the Classroom and the Community
PanoLite wasn't created in a corporate boardroom, it was born out of genuine frustration in the classroom and conversations within the 360° photography community. As an educator teaching design and media at the University of the Arts London (LCC) for over 20 years, I frequently saw students struggling to find accessible ways to work with their immersive images.
This same need echoed across the globe. Through years of discussions in the '360 Panoramic Photographers' Facebook group – which I co-admin alongside its founder, Sam Rohn – as well as at international meet-ups and conferences, a recurring theme emerged. Creators of all skill levels needed a simple, fast and cost-free way to build multi-scene virtual tours without hitting a paywall or navigating overly complex software.
Filling a Gap, Not Fighting the Giants
It is important to state what PanoLite is not. This tool is not intended to compete with the heavy-hitting, professional desktop software suites such as KRPano, Pano2VR, or 3DVista. Nor is it trying to steal legitimate customers from robust cloud hosting services such as Teliportme.
Those tools are incredible, and they are necessary for high-end, complex commercial work. However, there has long been an unfulfilled need for a lightweight, accessible stepping stone. PanoLite exists to fill that exact gap: a frictionless, free utility for students, hobbyists, and professionals who just need to quickly link a few scenes together without the overhead of a massive software suite.
The Technical Philosophy: Privacy First
The core architectural decision behind PanoLite is its absolute commitment to user privacy. Most web-based tour builders require you to upload massive, high-resolution image files to a remote server before you can even begin linking your rooms together.
PanoLite utilizes modern web APIs to process your equirectangular JPEG files entirely within your web browser's local memory. Your intellectual property never leaves your computer until you explicitly choose to publish your exported, self-contained tour in your own site. By ensuring no data is sent to a server, PanoLite remains incredibly fast, entirely private, and completely free to operate.
Open Source Foundations
To ensure that the tours generated by PanoLite remain future-proof, the final exported projects are built around the Pannellum engine. Pannellum is a free, open-source panorama viewer built using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and WebGL. By leveraging this MIT-licensed framework, PanoLite ensures that you have total ownership of your final HTML and image assets – free from proprietary lock-in.
About the Developer
I am Keith Martin, a London-based photographer, developer, designer and educator. Alongside my ongoing academic work in interaction design and VR media creation, I have a long history of building tools to solve specific industry headaches. Prior to PanoLite, I created Exif Fixer, a popular utility for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and also web app, that calculates and injects the missing spatial metadata required for panoramic images to display correctly on social media platforms.
In 2021, my expertise in the field led to a contract with Meta, where I was tasked with designing the content architecture for their official creator portal. Working alongside industry veterans Eric Cheng and Steve Cooper, we built a global resource for immersive video and photo creators.
