February 7th, 2012
Michael and Alfie over at PFREtour.com just told me about some significant new features they have added tour their tours. Here is a summary: Embeddable Tours: You can now embed your tour on any website. This is a great option if you have agents that want to include the tour right on their agent or [...]
January 18th, 2012
Today as a follow-up to comments I made on Monday’s post about taking control of how your images are presented Brandon Beechler, an Orange County, CA Architectural photographer/web designer pointed out that he agrees and since he is skilled in CSS and HTML he creates and hosts his own tours for his real estate photography [...]
January 16th, 2012
David Eichler just showed me a shoot that he did recently of a high-end property, The Tobin-Clark Estate-Hillsborough, CA listed at $29,000,000. This home is considered one of finest designs of Architect David Adler . As David explains on his blog post that has 11 images from this shoot, this is not a typical real estate shoot in that [...]
January 15th, 2012
On Friday Tourbuzz.net announced what they call “tactical” video on their tours. Tactical video is Clips are limited to 10MB (10-15 seconds) that you can upload just like still photos. As far as I can tell this is a completely a new concept to have short clips in a tour. Here is an example of [...]
December 26th, 2011
Chad Jones sent me a quote from one of his best clients: I want you to honestly tell me if virtual tours are in the way out of fashion because I have been on the phone with realtor.com complaining that no one is looking at the tours from their website on most all of my [...]
December 13th, 2011
Herb at Tourfactory.com gave me a free tourfactory.com tour to contrast how tourfactory.com tours look and function differently than the pfretour.com tour I’m using. I have to say that design wise Tourfactory.com tours are the very best looking still tour design that I’ve ever seen. No exceptions! If you are using just still photos tourfactory [...]
November 10th, 2011
Today Mike O’Neill in Knoxville, TN asked a great question: “I see lots of articles about using Video to market your properties, a few on Tours. Can you write an article about Video vs Tours ? I’m in Knoxville, TN doing some real good virtual tours, but I’m seeing Video moving up the popularity scale. I [...]
November 8th, 2011
Last week I was talking to David Eichler about the options for great looking slide shows. David thought that Slideshow Pro was flash only. It’s not. Generally there are two kinds of real estate photographers: Ones that don’t have any inclination or desire to fool around with HTML and would rather just use turn-key tours. [...]
November 2nd, 2011
Several things have got me thinking about this subject lately: I’ve seen several real estate photographers websites recently where the presentation of the gallery images detracts from the impact of the images. This principle is my 10th essential of my 10 essentials of real estate photography and I’m rewriting this section in the third edition [...]
October 23rd, 2011
Ethan Tweedie a photographer on the big Island of Hawaii who is moving into real estate photography sent me a link to a tour of a listing he shot of a $28 million listing. This is exactly what every real estate photographer needs, a great upper-end listing for their portfolio. First off I want to congratulate [...]
September 14th, 2011
Estella Sneider showed me one of her recent shoots at 1380 Bella Oceana Vista in Pacific Palisades, CA. This is the Realtor.com listing. I think Estella did a lovely job! The photos have a nice crisp sparkly look and feel. I think she’s done a nice subtle job lighting it. This was a beautiful day [...]
July 5th, 2011
A while back I did a post on Marc Angeles. in LA who had a YouTube video that had the video track shutdown because Marc had used some copyrighted audio (Marc has since replaced the track with some non-copyrighted music). J Miller raised the question, “how do you find legal music for videos”? Good question. [...]
June 2nd, 2011
Estella Sneider showed me one of her recent shoots that she shot for Mauricio Umansky of the Umansky Group in Los Angeles/Beverly Hills. I noticed that Estella’s tour is built around Slideshow Pro Director which nicely handles the issue of universal access. That is, making sure your tour/gallery looks good on Flash and non-Flash platforms. Many [...]
April 18th, 2011
John Quarles, of Birmingham, AL who is on a quest for the best way to host his property videos pointed out to me last week that the SlideshowPro.com Director hosting is a very useable and inexpensive way to host property video and slide shows that you want viewable on any computer or mobile device. This [...]
March 24th, 2011
Because my wife has been a 26 year listing agent and I spent 10 years helping her list homes I tend to see the world, much of the time, as a listing agent. One phenomena that has always amazed me is the magic effect of giving the home seller a DVD with photos of their [...]
March 20th, 2011
Allan MacKenzie of Brisbane, AU sent me an example of a home he shot recently. He’s posted both stills and video to this SmugMug slide show format. I’ve seen other real estate photographers use this SmugMug slide show format which allows you to post both stills and video in the same tour. On the surface [...]
January 19th, 2011
Wow, the response to the post I did last Friday on How Do Your Real Estate Tours And Slide Shows Look On The iPad? demonstrated there is a lot of energy out there on this subject. I thought it may be useful to show an example of a cool little slide show building product that [...]
January 13th, 2011
Real estate agents and real estate photographers need to be taking the time to find out how their slide shows and home tours look on the iPad. Why? Because iPads don’t run Flash (which most real estate slide shows and tours are based on) and Apple sold between 11 and 13 million iPads in 2010. [...]
December 22nd, 2010
As a real estate photographer you’d like to be able to have a tour in your product offering that doesn’t cost much to provide and be able to sell to your customers at what ever price you see fit and have the tours appear like you host the tours in your own domain right? Problem [...]
December 5th, 2010
I was watching a live.twit.tv re-run this morning and Leo Laporte was ranting about a new App he was using that creates 360 cylindrical panoramas on the fly as you pan your iPhone around. As a long time 360 image hacker that has spent 100s of hours stitching 360 images, I couldn’t help myself. I blew 99 cents [...]
