How to embed and market with your virtual tour

Why use BitLy?There are many URL shortening services available online. Bitly, Tinyurl, Goo.gl, Ow.ly are some of the examples that are free to use and also offers additional services like link bookmarking for a fee.URL Shorteners have been growing with popularity. Additionally, minimizing the number of characters in your link is the way to go these days, before you share it out to your friends or potential customers. Not only does it shorten your URL, it also gives you data and metrics to see how many users have clicked on your link.Another important reason is that if one of your marketing strategy involves SMS blast targeting, then it will be wise to shorten your URL link of your virtual tour before you send out. Along with other marketing messages, typical SMS services allows up to 160 words per message, hence shortening your URL gives you more space. Learn how to create virtual tour for your impressive presentation of your property here if you have not done so: http://bit.ly/createvirtualtour.Today we will show you how to use BitLy's URL Shortener and to track your leads, giving you an idea how effective your marketing is. How to use BitLy?Go to www.bitly.com and sign up for a free account. You can also do a quick sign up using your FaceBook or Twitter account just by clicking on the options available. It is recommended to use BitLy with an account even though you do not need one just to shorten your URL. By signing up for an account, you will be able to track and view the response of the URL you send out to better gauge your marketing effectiveness. After you login, click on the create bitlink button on the top right corner. Copy and paste the URL that you want to shorten onto the box. In our example, we will copy the link of your PanoLeh virtual tour and paste onto the search box to get the shortened URL. You may optionally customize the link to any name you desire, provided it hasn’t already been taken. Usually, I would create shorter names that are easier to remember or something more meaningful. The availability of names is on a first come first served basis. That’s it, you have created your link. Send out this link or attach it along with your SMS or WhatsApp to reach out to your customers. How to Track Your Leads? After you have shared your link out to your customers, BitLy will give you the metrics and information about how many users have clicked and viewed your link. Location tracking is also one of the features, so you know where your interested users are coming from. If you need help with BitLy, Click “help” in their footer, or go to http://support.bitly.com/knowledgebase. Good luck with your links and please feel free to share if you find this article useful to your friends or colleagues. An online video tutorial is also available for a more illustrative demonstration on PanoLeh's youtube channel.  http://bit.ly/2kvVebV

15th February 2017

The invention of 360 Cameras is considered a god send, given how easy it is to use and the quality of the photo it provides. For the pro or zealous photo enthusiast, these raw shot quality will always fall short and inapt in their eyes. That is why we created this simple tutorial for the beginners to teach them about post photo processing. Photo editing is equivalent  to a lady putting on her make up. Trying to put on her best look before the world. This tutorial gives you the basic knowledge you need to produce the best photo for your virtual tour to capture your buyer’s attention. Now let us get into the basic terms and jargon of photography.Temperature – changes the colour temperature of the photo. Usually to give a more warm effect.Saturation – helps to enhance strength of colourBrightness – brightness refers to the overall lightness or darkness of the image   Highlight – used for toning down exposure. Strong light from the sun will result in a white washout photo, highlight can help to tone it down.Shadow – darken and usually applied to create beautiful shadows in photosContrast – is the difference in brightness between objects or regions. For example, a white rabbit running across a snowy field has poor contrast, while a black cat against the same white background has good contrast.Sharpening – increase the sharpness significantly because unlike DSLR cameras, 360 Cameras images lack the sharpness.  Sharpening works on the edges of light and dark pixels. Clarity – adds contrast to the mid-tones of the photo. The results is in finer detail of textures. Clarity also results in lesser noise to the photo than sharpening. This is why the sharpening slider is immediately positioned before the noise reduction slider in the workflow. Notice the details in the walls between both photos belowWe would be using a free online editor PICMONKEY. So go to www.picmonkey.com.We also have a more illustrative video tutorial on photo editing and you can check it out by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/2mFwDD5 TemperaturePlaying with the temperature setting is one of the easiest way to transform a plain looking photo into a homey looking feel. Transformation can be drastic depending how much its applied. In the below example, Before applyingAfter applyingExposureUnder the exposure tab, you will find brightness, highlight, shadow and contrast. These are the most common settings that you have probably heard of. In this example, we have brightened the picture, lowered the highlight a bit to tone down the overexposure (caused by the strong sunlight). We also increased the contrast to brighten up the objects in the photo. Before adjusting After adjustingAuto AdjustLast but not least if all this is too taxing for you, there is always a auto adjust button where the program automatically edit the photo for you. It’s a instant quick fix and we definitely recommend you to try it out. 

28th February 2017

Do you know that now you don't need a 360camera to do a virtual tour. You can take a panoramic photo with your phone by simply using the cardboard camera app and its a simple and easy process. Previously to build a virtual tour, you would need to invest in a 360camera ranging from $200 to thousand of dollars to take photos that gives you panoramic images. Panoleh is working with google to remove all compatibility issue so you can now use the standardize cardboard camera app by google to take panoramic photos suitable for creating virtual tour on our platform. You can also view our tutorial video on how to create a virtual tour with your phone by going to this link To get started, all you require is a simple monopod with a mobile phone holder. Any monopod is acceptable as long as the height of it is above your waist level. This is important for the angles so that it will gives your buyer a eye point of view after the virtual tour is created. Next you would need go to your apple app store or playstore to download the free cardboard app by google. You will require this app to take perfectly stitch photo everytime. 1) To begin taking panoramic photo with your phone,attached your phone to the mobile phone holder with the monopod. Open the app and select the orange camera logo to start shooting 2) Position yourself in the middle of the room and follow the instructions from the phone by turning around in a 360 circular motion. 3) That's it. Its as simple as that and you can go back to your app and check on your images to ensure its well stitched up. After that you can upload these images onto our panoleh platform and start creating your virtual tour. Below we have a comparison virtual tour where you can compare the difference. If you are viewing this on your phone, its best to tilt your phone and view it on landscape mode for the best experienceNext click on the image below to see the virtual tour done by a 360camera As you can see from the above comparison, the quality taken by phone is certainly good enough due to how advance phone cameras are these days. If you are still considering or deciding which 360camera to buy, why not consider buying a monopod and try taking with your mobile first. Don't forget to check out our video tutorial on this if you have initially missed it by clicking on the link here .

6th June 2017