Hey guys, we thought it would make sense to share this cool video below by File Photography that shows their 360 spin photography setup and process that many of you might find helpful. They have a nice setup and we like their lighting – looks a lot like one of ours (although we don’t use strobes – only continuous lights for 360s!)

Just a couple of notes. As you can see it took quite some time (even though they tried to speed it up in the video) to produce 72 images with the manual turntable operation just for one single product. Perhaps with the help of another person, which we don’t see in the video, the whole process would have been a bit easier, but it’s still time consuming to do this manually. Also looks like the software they used to create the final 360 view was not built for this purpose, not to mention the Flash output that is becoming less and less popular on the web these days.

This is exactly the reason why we are in the business of hassle-free 360 photography. A combination of professional lighting like the one you see in the File Photography video and professional robotic 360 photography turntables plus HTML5 software makes the 360 photography more fun. And from our experience, producing such photography for the last 5 years, this is the most productive way of creating 360 views for e-commerce.

Did you know that WebRotate 360 Product Viewer includes free plugins for Magento, OpenCart, Prestashop, WordPress, Joomla, and now BigCommerce and WooCommerce? Plugins are small out-of-the-box components that make it possible to quickly integrate our 360 product viewer using dedicated support provided by these popular web platforms – no programming knowledge is necessary! They have been thoroughly tested in house as well as by many users around the globe.

We also maintain our software support forum where you can ask related questions for each type of integration or find already existing answers.

Download the plugins here:

• Magento
• OpenCart
• PrestaShop
• WordPress
• Joomla
• BigCommerce
• WooCommerce

We’re working on adding support to other popular e-commerce and CMS platforms. Stay tuned!

Today we're announcing a long awaited release of our updated Magento Integration v3.5 on Magento Connect. There are several major enhancements in this release:

• Integration has been updated to the latest stable 360 viewer script that packs a slew of improvements and latest fixes (more is coming in the next script update shortly).
• prettyPhoto lightbox support has also been updated to one of the latest releases (you can now also choose one of several nice skins that it comes with).
• We introduced a new Ad-hoc integration mode (in addition to the standard one). It allows you to keep any other customizations or third-party modules that you might previously had installed on your product pages in the same location where we activate our standard integration. Previously this was a major concern as there have been many conflicts with the existing 3d party modules that could be only resolved by uninstalling one of the components. Now with the addition of the new Ad-hoc integration you can hook the 360 degree photos pretty much anywhere on your product pages. It can be used as an embedded 360 view or as a small image thumbnail (or a text link) that will activate the viewer inside the same prettyPhoto lightbox popup.
• We also added our Root Path / Master config support that allows you to have a single 360 viewer configuration file for all of your products in Magento (assuming they have the same number of 360 images, etc) and also support for loading your 360 degree product photos from an external server or CDN.
• Other minor extras and fixes.

Here's some of the screenshots from this release:

PS: this new module has already been successfully installed by a few folks and they reported that everything went smoothly via Magento CE 1.6 and 1.7.

Check out our latest blog post on PhotoGear 360 where we talk about 360 spin photography of flashlights using the Ortery equipment combo, consisting of the PhotoCapture 360 photography turntable and PhotoSimile 50 Lighbox.

We shared a pretty interesting write up there that you can find helpful when photographing small uniform products similar to flashlights using the Ortery hardware. Here's a short extract from this post:

"What we also had to figure out was how to best present the flashlights as just dropping them on the 360 turntable was not expected to produce good results – we wanted to achieve a straight horizontal orientation of each object as if it was floating in the air while rotating in 360 degrees. Our solution was this small DIY mini platform with two tiny stands made out of metallic paperclips that we then plugged into the piece of cardboard foam...".

Click on this image to read the full post that also shows a completed 360 video of one of the finalized flashlights (there was about a hundred of those!).