How to download your 360 photos and videos from your Ricoh Theta S or SC to your Mac

A USB cable and Image Capture are all you need to speed up your workflow substantially

Ricoh’s Theta S/SC 360 cameras still rank near the top (if not the top) of the best-selling 360 cameras despite lots of new entrants and more aggressively priced competitors because they’ve nailed the sweet spot of price/performance/ease of use.

Ricoh’s Theta S (front) and Theta SC cameras remain strong sellers even today.

But while their iOS and Android apps are invaluable during the shooting proces, if you take a large amount of photos, you know it takes forever to transfer photos and videos (especially video) using their smartphone app.

A better solution is to transfer all your 360s directly to your computer, using Image Capture, a free utility bundled with every Mac. In this quick guide we’ll walk you through how, and also show you how to stitch your 360 videos:

Plug in your camera to your Mac, using the USB cable.

2. Start the Image Capture app.

You’ll find it in your Applications folder. If you haven’t done this before, it’s likely that iPhoto/Photos will spring up and ask whether you want to import the photos. Ignore it. You’ll use the Ricoh Theta software later on.

Image Capture is a handy utility that’s installed on most Macs.

3. Set the “Import to” folder location to where you want to keep your photos.

It helps if you have one folder that you keep all your 360 images since Image Capture will try and show when you’ve already downloaded a photo/video (in our experience this works some of the time, and not others).

4. Select the photos you want to import and click the “Import” button.

You can shift-select to select the ones you want to download, or if you want to download all of them, click the “Import All” button.

The photos/videos will now begin transferring to your computer. Depending on how much you’re transferring, this can take anywhere from a few moments to a few minutes.

For photos, you’re all done. For your video files you’ll need to stitch the video files. This is because while photos are already stitched and stored as equirectangular images, the videos are stored un-stitched. Here’s how you fix that problem: