Backlinks PRO

Making connections between posts is the most important part of creating a virtual tour. That's where you spend most of your time. This tutorial will show you how to do it in an effective way and save time using the backlinking feature.

Backlinks take a moment to get used to. This tutorial will show you the necessary steps in order to quickly get familiar with this feature.

Step 1. Point camera in a consistent direction

To speed up the process of creating the tour you can plan ahead during the shoot. Adding links will be much easier if all your panoramas are facing in the same direction.

Sample panoramic shoot: placements & directions

The red dots on the image above show spots where you shoot a panorama and the arrow shows the direction the camera is facing. The trick is to make sure to not rotate the tripod & camera when moving around to property.

The direction you choose doesn't matter, as long as it is consistent. A lot of 360 cameras look very similar on both sides, so you can use a small sticker to mark which side is the front.

Step 1 (alternative). Align the photos in the editor

If you already have shot your tour and the panoramas are not facing the same direction or you can't shoot them that way - no problem. You can fix it after you upload them to Kuula.

The way to do it is to go post by post and set the heading of each photo facing the same physical direction. To set the heading, drag the blue icon to the desired position:

Adjust heading by dragging the heading icon

Step 2. Enable Backlinks in Preferences

Before you start building the tour, there's one more thing to check. You'll need to make sure backlinks are enabled. For this, head to the Preferences section and find the dropdown under Editor > Backlinks.

Backlink settings in Preferences

If you are just starting with backlinks, we recommend choosing the Ask each time option first. It will ask you each time before adding a backlink. This way you can see hwhen this function is activated.

Once you get familiar with it, you can switch to Add and remove automatically for a faster workflow. This setting can be changed any time.

Step 3. Build the tour

The video below shows the entire process of uploading photos and connecting them using backlinks.

That video is the advanced version of the video presented in the introductory tutorial. The main difference is that for this one, the photos were correctly aligned during shoot (Step 1) and that Backlinks are set in Preferences to Add and remove automatically (Step 2).

Adding hotspot connections with backlinks

Tweaking the backlinks

As you can see in the video, the Kuula editor tries to insert the backlinks in the right place in the panorama. However, it's good to always review them and adjust their position if necessary. Most of the time, it will be just a little bit off, but sometimes you may need to move them more. Linked hotspots are independent of each other when it comes to their position in the panorama. You can move one without moving the other.

Learning curve

Backlinking has a small learning curve to it but it helps you to create tours faster. It's worth spending an hour or two getting used to this feature. Practice on a simple tour and make sure to use the Ask each time setting in Preferences. Once you get a hold of this feature, you will never want to create a tour without it!