TourBuzz Virtual Tour Community

All Blog Posts (28)

Adding Tours to Twitter and Facebook Automatically

Every tour can be automatically posted to Twitter and FaceBook. Photographers can have all the tours they publish post their

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Added by Paul Rodman on March 17, 2010 at 8:00pm — No Comments

New HDR Software promises easier "natural" results

http://www.hdrdarkroom.com/examples.htm HDR Darkroom (for Mac and PC) was recently released and promises to make it easier to get "natural" results. They have a dual system, one pane for making "natural" results, and another for making "surreal" results.

At only $50, this might be a great new tool for real estate photographers using HDR to produce better results. There

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Added by Alan Pinstein on February 11, 2010 at 11:00am — 3 Comments

Realtor.com Syndication

would be nice to have it so we can repost listing to realtor.com through tourbuzz for when the listing changes mls#'s or if listing has more than 2 mls#'s, as now once it posts you can't use tourbuzz again to syndicate, have to go to picture path, not urgent but would be a time saver. Continue

Added by BestHDTour.com on October 26, 2009 at 11:16am — 1 Comment

Another amazing image editing system -- not sure if it's good for real estate but it will amaze you!

You can watch the video and check out the sample gallery in less than 5 minutes. Truly amazing. Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on October 6, 2009 at 12:30am — No Comments

PatchMatch update - coming to Photoshop CS5!

I blogged previously about PatchMatch, a new image editing algorithm that allows you to interactively edit image contents. For example, you could easily remove trash cans or people from a photo, or even touch up areas that were obscured or missing for some reason. In case you missed it, here's the demo video:

Today I learned that PatchM… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on September 26, 2009 at 12:30pm — No Comments

Using a Cannon? Try CHDK to enable lots of extra features for free!

I've mentioned it before, but if you've got a Canon camera, you absolutely must try the CHDK firmware for it. To get started with CHDK, you just download the CHDK software to an SD card and restart the camera, which then boots the alternative… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on September 23, 2009 at 10:18am — No Comments

Open-source camera

A quick post to share an amazing story with you -- some guys at Stanford University are close to releasing an open-source camera. There have already been some open-source firmware replacements for existing cameras, but this project seems designed from the ground-up to be extended and manipulated by third parties. Check out the article and the demo animations to get a sense of what the f… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on September 3, 2009 at 10:26pm — No Comments

Multiple Agents

How do I include multiple agents on the Customer page? Continue

Added by JamesW on August 29, 2009 at 9:08am — No Comments

Pricng Srategies for "Do it Yourself" Tours

I have heavy competition from Tour Factory (TF) in my area (Charlotte NC). TF has a "do it yourself" option where the agent can use their own images to build the tour. TF charges a monthly fee to host the tours. They have a "special" running now that allows unlimited tour hosting for $30.00/mth. I am slowly but surely convincing agents to switch by showing them the superior TB viewer and giving them better tour syndication than TF (the factor agents seem to care about most). I have found that m… Continue

Added by Cal Mitchener on August 23, 2009 at 3:00pm — 2 Comments

Amazing new Video Stabilization Technique

It's not available anywhere yet, but you absolutely must watch this demo video of a new video image stabilization filter. The ability to produce cinematic camera motion without steadycams or other professional equipment could really help real estate video in the future. Expect this technique to be available in software within 12-18 months. Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on July 1, 2009 at 12:53am — 1 Comment

Seam Carving and PatchMatch (new)

If you haven't heard of Seam Carving, it's a way to easily change only the width of an image without distortion. It can also be used to remove objects such as people, trash cans, etc. It's very cool. There are seam carving plugins available for Photoshop and other tools if you search for them. A new tool called PatchMatch was recently announced by image… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on May 29, 2009 at 10:51pm — No Comments

TourBuzz now Syndicates via Neybor to HotPads and others!

Our Neybor automated real estate marketing product continues to improve. This week we added a few more features that are very important to TourBuzz users:

Syndication to HotPads and all of HotPads Distribution Partners
Ability to add MLS information to Neybor listings
Ability to invite collaborators to a Neybor listing even after th

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Added by Alan Pinstein on May 15, 2009 at 7:42pm — 4 Comments

TourBuzz adds support for Canonical URLs for Tours to improve SEO

We recently added support for canonical URLs for tours. As you know there are many different links that take you to slightly different versions of the tour. However for search engine purposes it's best to just have one "preferred" (canonical) URL for a page. Google recently added support for doing just this, and we have added support to Tourbuzz to always point Google to the main branded tour. For more information, read this… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on May 5, 2009 at 10:09am — No Comments

Why home values may take decades to recover

I've been studying the real estate industry for about 6 years now. I started getting a bit skeptical of the market being overheated at that time when I was condo shopping. I ultimately decided not to buy because I thought prices were too high. After that, I intently studied the financial indicators of the real estate industry, trying to find all of the ones relevant to determining if there is a housing bubble or not. I was particular interested in this because of our Showcase Web Sites business… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on May 3, 2009 at 8:30pm — 1 Comment

5 TourBuzz Features Everyone Should Be Using

At last night's great Virtual Meeting III, I talked briefly about some TourBuzz features that everyone should use because they will help you get more business. I wanted to follow-up and explain them in more detail: 1. Branded URLs By default, all tours have a link that looks like http://tourbuzz.net/1234. However, we allow you to map all of your tours to a subdomain of your own domain name, like: http://tours.acmevirtualtours.com/1234. Benefits: - Tours that are 100% branded to… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on April 30, 2009 at 10:30am — No Comments

If you aren't spending time every day on SEO/SEM, you are throwing away money!

I just came across a great article about SEO/SEM today, and it reminded me that I should take the opportunity to point out the importance of SEO/SEM as a lead generator for virtual tour businesses. In case you don't know, Google AdWords offers amazing geo-targeting capabilities. You can display an ad for your services anytime someone in your metro area searches for, say "real estate photographer". If… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on March 18, 2009 at 10:00am — 13 Comments

New Portfolio

I just updated my portfolio. I use smugmug.com to store my clients photos. My clients love that they can download directly from this site. I recommend this site as another place to store your work. This link is to my new portfolio...take a look and let me know what you all think: http://zacharycornwell.smugmug.com/photos/swfpopup.mg?AlbumID=7507042&AlbumKey=2jKfY Cheers, Zac Continue

Added by Zachary on March 5, 2009 at 1:21am — 23 Comments

Great Discussion on Boston.com about Virtual Tours

A virtual tour provider in Boston just sent me a great link to a post disucssing virtual tours for real estate. It contains a diversity of opinion on the utility of virtual tours that I think you'll all find good reading, if not instructive for your marketing and sales efforts. Views from all perspectives: buyers, sellers, agents,… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on March 2, 2009 at 12:30pm — 3 Comments

Photography Tips for Capturing HDR-Suitable Images

In case you can't tell, I am an HDR fanboy. So I was enthralled to see a link to the 5-part series on HDR capture posted on Larry's site. I read the whole thing, and while it's worth a read if you're really interested, the 2 most important things I learned from the article were: 1. Use your on-camera histogram to make sure you're capturing broad exposure data. 2. Due to the technical de… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on February 28, 2009 at 1:24am — No Comments

Easy HDR from a Single RAW File

I've recently learned a great trick for getting natural HDR results for virtual tours without a lot of extra work. If you have a camera that generates RAW files, your camera is already capturing much more exposure information than a typical JPEG can handle. Most RAW files store 12 bits per pixel, and some newer ones are 14-bit. A 12-bit file has 16x more information than a JPEG, and a14-bit file has 64x more information. Coupled with good HDR software, a single RAW file can be converted into m… Continue

Added by Alan Pinstein on February 16, 2009 at 12:30am — 13 Comments