You have completed your 360 spin and have all the images… so, what’s next?
The most important next step is to find a viewer or host site to display your spin or embed it on your website. Hosting pages are extremely powerful: they allow for file optimization, changing of size parameters, changing output resolutions, exporting for interfaces such as Grainger, Amazon, Walmart, and much more.
An added benefit for using a hosting site is that they allow for use of a single link for completed spins, keeping all the 360 product images in one place and making sharing or downloading incredibly easy. The only real consideration is cost of the service, however, for the power or the platform and relative ease of use…the cost is negligible. This is especially the case when you consider the price of IT work. We strongly recommend Sirv.com based on our years of overwhelming success with it. Having a service host your spins is straightforward and simple.
A 360 spin is essentially a linear animation of images in a grid. Think of a digital flipbook flipbook: each image traveling along the timeline to the next is what creates the movement. These viewers / hosts allow your potential customers to use a mouse wheel, cursor or their touchscreens to interact with the timeline of photos and experience the spin and 360 view.
REVO’s tips for best spin practices are:
Make certain to use only jpegs for your 360 product spin. Since you can change file sizes on hosted sites there’s no real reason to use tiffs or other massive file types. You don’t want to slow down your loading times using massive files for each image of a 36 frame spin.
Have your spin set to AutoSpin. This way as soon as the page loads the product will start to move, capturing the eyes of your potential customer in a natural way.
Limit the number of spins per page. This relates to our first tip, especially since it regards file sizes and page loading times. Don't slow down your page!
You can host your own spins on a server as well. If you are a large company with extremely robust internet connections, and a dedicated IT department, hosting yourself can be a good option for full control. We’ll get a blog post on that up in the coming weeks.
Here at Revo photo we have tried many different hosts and once again strongly recommend SIRV for hosting your 360 spin photography.
If you’d like to find out more about uploading 360 degree spin photos or 360 product photography equipment, we’d love to talk. Contact us through our website or call on 415.335.9114