CloudPano Review

Hi! It’s me again, continuing my search for what program is best for my needs to share my 360° media. Today I’m focusing on the CloudPano application!

I used the Ricoh Theta SC Hatsune Miku to capture my photos/videos as usual. I am interested in trying out different 360° programs in order to find what fits my needs best; something quick, efficient, and optimized for social media.

Initial Thoughts

The CloudPano website is modern and features a sales pitch intended to drive interest in the paid version of the application. The website makes the software seem geared towards real estate, as all of the example images feature homes on display. If you scroll towards the bottom of the page, you can see the different pricing tiers, confirming that this is software geared towards individuals promoting. For this review, I went for the best bang for my buck – I had no bucks, so “Free” it was!

The Lead Capture Tool for the Pro Plus tier

In the application itself, you are able to host up to 50 MB for a tour. For me, this was around 13 images. As you can see in the screenshot below, you’re given a lot of options. The “Edit Tour” option lets you quick edit your images and order. “Brand Kit” felt slightly misleading, but allows you to change some of the visual appearance of your tour. The “Floor Plan” and “Lead Gen” options are real estate focused and fairly self explanatory (and Lead Gen is not possible in the Free version!). The “Live” and “Team” options are both also available only through the paid membership, allowing for livestreaming and group editing, respectively.

Perhaps most interesting is the “Settings” tab which allows you to add a soundscape (and you know I did indeed add one of the 3 interesting choices) as well as a Google Analytics link. This could be particularly useful if you’ve bothered to create a Lead Gen form as a Pro Plus member.

One major issue I had with Cloudpano is that there is no editing feature. This particularly is unfortunate as it means images must be ready to go before being put into the application. The added step of having to edit my images elsewhere isn’t preferred, though there are enough unique features in Cloudpano to make it easier to overlook this fact.

One thing that was mildly annoying was the various popups that came up every time a feature from the “Pro” toolkit was selected. This is an example of one. Of note is that the “Pro” version is $10 per tour and the “Pro Plus” is $33/month. As you can see, the “Skip Payment” option pops up for Free users who are within their first free 3 tours.

If you’d like to view my tour, you can do so here. In summary, here are my pros and cons for the CloudPano web tool:

Pros Cons
Reactive and quick application No editing abilities
Can take larger number of images than most competitors A lot of features are in the Pro or Pro Plus edition
Hotspot options are more plentiful than other free editors and Overall highly geared towards making a sale, though the free version is suitable if your images are ready for sharing
Quick uploading time
Highly geared towards lead generation, so great for real estate!

Concluding Thoughts

After writing this review, I realized that I liked CloudPano more than initially expected when I sat down to write this. I think this is because despite it only doing a few things at the free level, it does them really well. That leads me to believe that if you are looking to share something like a real estate tour, this is a great tool at a $10 investment per tour. While not great if you need to edit your images, in general CloudPano feels like a great fit if you are looking to share a tour, not a single image.

Until next time!

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Cloud pano is wonderful… they are building new features all the time so it gets better and better.

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@Mark_Reed What do you use Cloudpano for? Professionally?

Is that giant yellow “YO” a permanent exhibit at Stanford? I haven’t seen it before. I haven’t been to the art museum in over a year.

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According to their site, it looks like the exhibit is ongoing, but possibly not permanent.

I think that the YO is good for the museum as it helps to cater to the demographic closer to the age of the students. Good for social media, facebook posts AND 360 image tours taken with the THETA SC Hatsune Miku special edition camera.

It’s different from the majority of the collection, but change is good in my opinion. I appreciate that the campus is for young people and that the entire school is named after a child.

I may go see the OY/YO too.

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Inspired by the awesome shots from @zatsune. Sent my daughter out to check out OY/YO. She created this tour. I still haven’t seen the OY/YO personally, but it seems perfect for 360 pictures. Nice find by @zatsune. Maybe this will be a thing to do in Silicon Valley .

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Blurring the face is a nice touch, I’m glad to have inspired a trip on this hot day! I share a phone case with your daughter. :slight_smile:

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She was trying to use the THETA+ app to put a panda sticker over her face and the export it as an equirectangular image, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. The THETA+ app seems to export only flat 2D images from the sticker feature.

Do you know if it’s possible to edit THETA pictures with animal stamps in the THETA+ app and retain the 360 view so that she can import the pictures into cloudpano?

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Huh, that’s a good question! I don’t know, I tried doing this and it exported in 2D for me as well :frowning:

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Hey there. Looks like this review missed a lot of pro plus features. Would you like to give cloudpano pro plus a test drive to help this review be complete? Just email Zach and support@cloudpano.com. We can get you set up with a temporary account.

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@Zach_Calhoon Hi! I would love to try out the Pro edition and would be happy to write an updated review :slight_smile: Feel free to shoot me a message here and we can discuss things further.

@Zach_Calhoon are there key features of CloudPano Pro that we should pay attention to?

I think that the $33/month is not a big business cost. However, it may be take time for people to understand features like the Lead Capture Tool and the “360 Tour Creator” complete access. The difference in the tour creator features at free versus Pro+ would be especially interesting.