Designers often have to upload several versions of the same project. In the course of the work you pass through a lot of intermediate stages: you show one interim state, then the panorama is modified further, in the same room or from the same spot in the surrounding landscape. The replace-panorama function is of interest to photographers too. Say the quality of one of your spherical photo panoramas falls short of your standards and you only noticed after publishing it, and you want to upload a better panorama of the same place - an example comparing a panorama Before and AFTER

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The replace-panorama function is of interest to photographers as well. Say the quality of one of your spherical photo panoramas falls short of your standards. You only noticed after publishing, and you want to upload a retouched panorama of the same place.

Doing that the long way throws up two completely obvious problems:

1. If you upload the panorama from scratch, you then have to send the client an updated link to it as well. In some cases, where one and the same panorama has gone through a large number of interim stages - interior design being the most common example - the client ends up opening an out-of-date version by mistake. That is, they click an old link without meaning to, perhaps from an old email they opened by accident.
2. Every piece of descriptive information - title, description, tags and so on - has to be entered again, or copied across from the old panorama's properties page. Which also takes time.

The solution is the function that replaces a single panorama in place. If the link to the panorama stays the same and only its contents change, the risk of that mistake disappears - what opens is always the current version.

The advantages:

1. Info points are preserved along with all their settings. It is important to remember, though, that their position is tied to the boundaries of the source image. Panoramas with a different starting reference point will therefore place info points and transition points differently before and after the file is replaced.
2. The virtual coins in your account go further - more on that at the end of the article.
3. Most importantly, it saves your time. The laborious business of editing the text information is done once, when the panorama is first uploaded.

The steps for replacing a panorama are very simple.

Here they are as an animation:

I did hit a small snag here at first. Although True Virtual Tours lets you upload every image format, not every format can actually be processed. PNG is not an accepted file format.

• Through the settings of an individual panorama
• Through the settings inside a virtual tour

As for seeing the result - same as the first time round. Straight after uploading, nothing appeared to change in Opera. Open the same link in Chrome, though, and everything is as it should be.

The info points had shifted, as expected, because a different starting point had been chosen for the panorama:

And finally, the most interesting part. According to the balance sheet recording user actions, replacing a panorama costs half as much as uploading a new one.

Naturally the size of the image counts as well. For images of roughly equal size in megabytes, replacing works out cheaper than uploading a new panorama.

It follows that if updating a panorama - same approximate JPG file size and pixel resolution - costs less, you might also consider replacing all the associated information along with it. In other words: upload an entirely new panorama, change all of the information, and still spend less of your virtual currency. Worth keeping as a fallback.

Another advantage that matters: the link stays the same. Next time the viewer opens the updated panorama, they see the new version immediately.

But the main advantage, to my mind, is that you spend far less of your own time copying the same information over and placing the same info points again - and possibly the same camera fly-through positions too.

To finish, here is a checklist of what to verify after replacing a panorama:

• The position of existing info points. You may need to move them to the right place relative to the new image.
• The transitions within the virtual tour, and where they sit.
• The animation - that may need adjusting too.
• The initial viewing direction.