Virtual Tour Tutorial PRO

It is very easy to create and manage Virtual Tours with Kuula. Tours can be composed of 360 panoramic photos, regular photos or a mix of the two.

Whether you have shot a series of photos in a physical space (house, office, etc...) or you have rendered them using 3D software - you can upload the resulting images to Kuula and turn them into an immersive, interactive presentation.

Step 1. Upload photos

Make sure you have all the photos for the tour grouped in a folder. We recommend that you give the files descriptive names such as kitchen.jpg, bed-room.jpg or main hall.jpg instead of IMG_2847.jpg. Kuula will automatically pull those file names and use them as the post description, so you will know which photo is which. This is not always obvious by looking at the thumbnails alone.

Before you upload, you can choose the level of quality/compression. This setting can be found in the Preferences section, under Photo Compression.

Now, go to the Create Tour section that you can find in the top bar, under Upload or in the side menu. Make sure the first option, named Create Tour, is selected at the top and enter a name for your new tour. We also recommend adding the optional description.

Now, you are ready to add the photos. Drag & drop files from the folder on your computer or select them from the local drive by using the Select Images button. After the photos are all added, they will show up as a grid of thumbnails:

Tour Settings

Under the Tour Settings tab, you can select the type of animated transition used in this tour, enable the Walkthrough Mode or add a background Audio track. If you're not sure what to choose - don't worry, you can easily change them later on!

After you create your virtual tour, you can go back to this section any time to change the setting. To learn more about managing existing tour settings, please refer to this tutorial.

When you are done with the settings, hit the orange Post button at the top right.

Step 2. Build the tour

After this, your images are uploaded and grouped into a tour. You could stop here and share it right away, but it is not a fully featured Virtual Tour yet. What you need are hotspots connections!

The video tutorial below shows the process of connecting a tour composed of 6 images using hotspots:

Creating hotspot connections

Kuula user interface

Now let's review the key elements of the user interface presented in the video above. This is the screen you will see after hitting the Post button in the Create Tour section:

1. Click on the pen icon to enter edit mode.
2. Use the thumbnail bar to see the images in the tour and to move between them.
3. The Edit tour button gives access to tour settings discussed in Step 1.
4. After the tour is ready you can share it as explained in Step 3 below.

Clicking on the pen icon will switch the screen to edit mode. Most of the elements remain the same, but there are some important differences:

1. The right hand side panel now shows all the editing tools.
2. You can drag & drop the thumbnails on to the panorama to create connections.

Step 3. Share the tour

After you made all of the edits, you are ready to share the tour. There are a lot of ways to do that and it all starts with the Share button located on the left of the tour page, as shown below.

The most important sharing tool at your disposal is located under the Get link or embed code button. This will take you to the Export Editor where you can customize the tour before sharing it. You can enable features such as auto-rotate or auto-play, remove the Kuula UI, add your custom branding and use many other settings.

Once you adjust the settings to your liking, you can grab a unique link to share directly via email or instant message such as Messenger or Whatsapp or you can copy an embed code to add the tour to your website or listing.

Besides that, the share popup offers some "quick" options. You can copy a deep link to the tour or share the tour on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Do I need a PRO account to create tours?

Most of the functions described above require a PRO account. This includes unlisted posts & tours, hotspots and changing the order of the posts in a tour.

If you are on the Kuula basic/free plan, you can still create tours, but the available options are limited. The Create Tour is limited to 25 images at a time and there is a total limit of 100 uploads every month. Also with the free plan, all hotspots are private, which means you can edit them, but they will not be visible publicly.

With Kuula PRO, you can create public or unlisted virtual tours with no monthly upload limits. You can also share and embed the tours with your own logo or with no branding at all.