How to upload insta360 videos to Google Street View

A short tutorial on how to upload your insta360 videos to Google Street View.

1. Open and connect your insta360 mobile app, begin recording the video (be careful to grant permission for the app to utilize GPS data!) It is advised to use 24 to 30 frames per second and the highest resolution possible. Likewise, be careful not to move the camera while filming (you will see why it matters in step 5).

2. Finish recording at the place where you started / before you park your car (if it’s too late just cut it later then editing).

3. I haven’t tested how it operates on a mobile app, so I’ll describe using a desktop program (Windows or MacOS are both acceptable).

4. The video you captured may be found by connecting your insta360 camera to your computer or Mac, launching finder or explorer, going to the camera, and then to the folder where everything is saved. (they are labeled YYYYMMDD) You will find 2 similar files that are ending with .insv. Make sure you copy the one with ’00’ in its name! Example: “VID_20230117_110529_00_032.insv”.

5. After copying the video to your computer, open the insta360 app, select the video, and edit it as desired. Before exporting, ensure that Direction Lock is enabled! (You will have a difficult time editing later if you won’t enable it. For example, if you want to blur your car.)

6. Now click export > 360 and select the maximum in every setting and then pick whatever setting you want. here is what each of them means:\

H.264 > Supported by most programs and websites (in other words compatible with more stuff), offers less compression than H.265

H.265 > Offers Greater compression without quality loss (don’t quote me on this), is more demanding than H.264 and takes longer, your editing software might not support it but YouTube does support it.

Prores 422 I think > Good quality but Huge file size (might not work on windows)

7. After you exported the file you can edit it if you want but I’m not going to explain here what to do so just search on YouTube.

8. Now for the difficult part, After uploading the video to Street View Studio, you may encounter an error with the GPX data. Don’t worry, as long as you started recording with the mobile app, it should be safe.

9. Download ExifTool and put it near your video files (make sure to extract it of course).

10. And now for the commands. Download streetviewtutorial.zip, unzip gpx.fmt and put it near the exiftool.exe or in Mac just put it near the videos.

11. Commands:

Extracting GPX data from .insv:

exiftool.exe -m -ee -api largefilesupport -p gpx.fmt YOURVIDEOWITH_00_.insv > WHATEVER.gpx

Try one of the commands below if the above one doesn’t work (make sure to change file names of course)

exiftool.exe -m -ee -api largefilesupport -p gpx.fmt VID_20221103_082312_00_017.insv > vid.gpx

exiftool -api largefilesupport -ee -p '${GPSDateTime;DateFmt("%s")} ${gpslatitude#} ${gpslongitude#}' 'VID_20221203_180149_00_054.insv' > gps.txt

exiftool.exe -m -ee -api largefilesupport=1 -p gpx.fmt VID_20230114_163856_00_008.insv > VID_20230109_131112_00_007.gpx

In the end result you should see that one of those .gpx files is filled with data (mine was ~200kb)

12. Now in the same place where the exe is located create a .exif_config and put this code inside:

%Image::ExifTool::UserDefined::Options = (
    LargeFileSupport => 1,
);

13. Save exit and now for another command: (if you have made edits to your video type this command to fix dates)

exiftool -TagsFromFile ORIGINAL\_VIDEO.MP4 “-time:all>time:all” EDITED.MP4

14. Now that’s that finished try uploading your video to google street view studio, and select the .gpx file that is filled with some data.

15. Congratulations if Google doesn’t display any issues or warnings for you. You did it!

Error solving: (Only applies to Windows but might be similar on Mac too)

If Google keeps saying that the GPS time and video overlap or something like that make sure that the gpx file and your final video (the one you uploading) have the same dates and hours. if not, download BulkFileChanger drop your gpx / video files to there, click the little clock icon and start editing the dates and hours. I’m sure you will figure it out how to do it yourself.

I don’t understand why Google or Insta360 couldn’t figure it out on their own; it took me two days to research and an hour to write this guide.

The insta360 camera is a great alternative to a drone, but if you want to fly higher, then we advise you to read our review of the DJI Mini 3 Pro