How to Make a Virtual Tour from 360° Photos
To make a virtual tour you need 360° photographs of each room, software that links them together, and a place to publish the result. Shoot one panorama per room on a tripod, upload them, drop a hotspot on every doorway so a click walks the visitor into the next room, then publish the tour as a single browser link. With the photos already taken, the linking part takes about ten minutes.
Most guides to this question answer a different one: they explain how to buy a 3D scan. That is a real service, and it costs what a service costs. This page is about the other path — the one where you already own a 360° camera, or can borrow one for an afternoon, and want the tour to be yours.
What a virtual tour actually is
A virtual tour is a set of 360° photographs joined by clickable links. The visitor stands inside one photograph, drags to look around, clicks a doorway, and arrives inside the next one. Nothing is modelled, nothing is measured, nothing is installed. For the longer version, see what a virtual tour is.
That definition matters here because it tells you what you need and what you do not. You need photographs that cover the full sphere. You do not need a laser rig, a technician, or a site survey.
What you need before you start
- A 360° camera, or a DSLR plus a panoramic head and stitching software. A one-shot 360° camera is faster and good enough for listings.
- A tripod. Handheld panoramas tilt, and a tilted horizon is the one flaw a visitor notices immediately.
- One panorama per room, plus one per hallway or landing that connects rooms. Hallways are what people forget, and a tour without them has rooms that cannot be reached.
- Somewhere to publish. That is the part this site does.
The file you want is an equirectangular JPG
Every 360° camera exports one: a 2:1 image that looks stretched when you open it in an ordinary photo viewer. That is correct — it is a sphere unrolled flat. If your file is 2:1, a tour builder will take it. See equirectangular panoramas explained if what you have does not look like that.
The five steps
Shoot one panorama per room
Tripod at roughly eye height, in the middle of the room or slightly toward the doorway you came in from. Step out of frame or behind the camera. Shoot every room you want the visitor to reach, and every space between them.
Upload the panoramas
Drop the JPGs in. Each one becomes a scene. Nothing is stitched again and nothing is re-rendered — the photograph you took is the photograph the visitor sees.
Name the scenes the way a visitor would
“Living room”, “Kitchen”, “Main bedroom”. Not “IMG_0427”. These names show up in the scene list and in hotspot labels, and they are what a visitor reads when deciding where to go next.
Link the doorways with hotspots
Put a link hotspot on each doorway, pointing at the scene behind it. Add info hotspots where a room needs a note — ceiling height, what stays with the property, when the boiler was replaced. This step is what turns photographs into a tour.
Publish and send the link
Publishing produces one URL. Send it, or paste the iframe snippet into your own site. Until you publish, the tour stays private even if someone has the address.
How long it takes
| Stage | A three-room flat | A seven-room house |
|---|---|---|
| Shooting on site | 15–20 minutes | 40–60 minutes |
| Uploading and naming | 3 minutes | 8 minutes |
| Hotspots and links | 5 minutes | 15 minutes |
| Publishing | Instant | Instant |
Shooting is the slow part, and it is slow for the same reason ordinary listing photography is: you are tidying, waiting for light, and walking back for the thing you forgot. The software part does not scale badly — twice the rooms is roughly twice the clicks, not twice the difficulty.
Mistakes that cost you a reshoot
- Standing in your own photograph. A 360° camera sees behind itself. Trigger it from your phone and stand in the next room, or behind a door frame.
- Shooting a room with no way out. If there is no panorama of the hall, there is nothing to link the bedroom to, and the visitor dead-ends.
- Mixed exposures. Rooms shot at different times of day read as different houses. Shoot the whole property in one pass.
- Handheld frames. The horizon tilts, and in a 360° view a tilted horizon makes people queasy rather than just looking sloppy.
- Forgetting the nadir. Every 360° photo has the tripod in the floor. Most cameras patch it automatically; check that yours did before you leave.
What to do with the tour once it exists
A link is only worth what you do with it. Put it in the listing, in the reply you send to enquiries, and on your own site as an iframe — the same embed that runs the live demo on the PandaTour 360 home page. If you want enquiries out of it rather than views, turn on lead capture so a visitor who has walked the whole property can leave a name without closing the tour.
Making the tour for a house specifically? The next page to read is 3D virtual home tours — the same process, with the parts that differ for residential listings.