Uploading your photos to Tourly

Uploading is the most automated part of making a tour, but a few things are worth knowing — what happens in the background, why a scene might briefly look blurry, and how to recover when something gets stuck.

How to upload

1. Open your tour in the editor.
2. Click Add scenes in the sidebar (or drag a folder onto the editor).
3. Select your equirectangular JPGs. You can drop the whole folder.
4. Each scene appears in the sidebar with a "processing" indicator.
5. When the indicator turns green, the scene is ready to view and edit.

What happens behind the indicator

When a scene says "processing" we're doing a few things:

1. Validating the file. We check it's a 2:1 JPG and reject anything that isn't (this is where a "Free Capture" Insta360 export gets caught — see Exporting equirectangular images).
2. Tiling. Spherical viewers don't load the whole equirectangular image — they load small "tiles" of the cube faces at the resolution you're currently zoomed to. We pre-generate four resolution levels per scene so the viewer stays sharp from a thumbnail to a full-screen close-up.
3. Compressing and uploading the tiles to the CDN. A typical scene becomes ~200 small files served from edge locations, so even mobile viewers in spotty connections get something on screen within a second.
4. Generating a thumbnail for the scene picker.

How long does it take?

Per scene (5.7K)

~10–20 seconds after upload completes

Per scene (8K)

~25–40 seconds

Whole 12-scene tour

Usually ready within 3 minutes of upload

First few seconds in viewer

May appear soft while the highest-res tiles fetch — that's normal

If a scene gets stuck

99% of the time processing finishes within a minute. If a scene is still spinning after 5 minutes, the most likely cause is a malformed file — usually a JPG that isn't actually equirectangular, or one that exceeds our 50 MB ceiling.

Diagnose

• Open the file on your computer and check its dimensions. Width should be exactly 2× height (e.g. 5760×2880). If it's 4:3 or some other ratio, re-export from the camera app and choose the spherical/equirectangular option.
• File size over 50 MB? Re-export at 5.7K instead of 11K, or save at JPG quality 85 instead of 100. We don't need a magazine print — we need a web-fast tour.
• Is the JPG actually a JPG? Some camera apps export with a .jpg extension but a different internal format. Open it in a normal photo viewer first to confirm.

Fix

Delete the stuck scene from the sidebar (right-click → delete) and re-upload the corrected file. The scene's hotspots will be lost, but a stuck scene wasn't useful anyway. If the same file fails twice with no obvious problem, get in touch — we'd rather hear about it.

Upload order matters (a little)

New scenes append to the end of the sidebar in the order they finish processing — which isn't always the order you uploaded them, because larger files take longer.

After the dust settles, drag scenes in the sidebar to put them in the order you want viewers to walk through. The first scene in the list becomes the default cover scene unless you explicitly mark another with the star icon.

Replacing a scene without losing hotspots

Took a better shot of the kitchen? Right-click the scene → Replace photo. Hotspots stay where they were placed (in spherical coordinates), so as long as the new shot is from approximately the same camera position, doorways will still point at the right doors.

If you moved the camera substantially between shots, you'll need to nudge the hotspots — but it's still faster than starting over.

What's next

Photos uploaded, scenes ordered. Now the part where a tour stops being a slideshow and becomes a navigable space: hotspots.