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How to Download and View a Tour and Host it to Your Own Server
How to Download and View a Tour and Host it to Your Own Server

Here's everything to know about how to use downloaded tours.

Clayton Rothschild avatar
Written by Clayton Rothschild
Updated over a year ago

How to Download your Tour

To download a tour, simply just click on the drop down arrow right next to the 'Publish' button, located on top right of the editor page.

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A .zip archive will be produced and the download should start within 15 seconds in your web browser.


Why does my Downloaded Tour show a black screen?

When you extract the contents of your .zip archive, you will notice a couple folders and an index.html file. The folders contain your image assets.

The index.html is a web page - it is the entry-point to viewing your tour. Webpages should work straight from the file system, just double-click on HTML file in a file manager and it should appear working in the browser (you'll see file:///index.html in the address bar).

But! You will notice that the the index.html loads, but shows a black screen. This is expected. Loading from a file system will fail with a security exception due to browsers' same origin policy security restrictions.

This is not a CloudPano setting, this is your web browser's behavior. Imagine if any web page could access your local file system just by requesting file:///passwords.txt - no good!

While it is also possible to change browser security settings instead of running a local server, we do not recommend that approach. Doing so may open your device up to vulnerabilities, if the same browser is used for regular web surfing.

Not convinced about the security problem? You can read more here.

To solve this, and view your project, you should run files from a local web server or a remote web server.


How to View your Downloaded Tour on a web server

We recommend using your existing web provider's hosting. For example, BlueHost, GoDaddy, or your corporate company's servers.
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Simply upload your extracted zip archive to any folder on your remote server, and then view the tour by entering the URL into your web browser.

Your hosting company can give you instructions on how to upload your downloaded tour to your server and how to view the contents.

We also have a great video walkthrough here:


How to View a Downloaded Tour Locally

You can also spin up a temporary (or permanant) server on your local computer, and then view the server in your browser - no hosting fees required. Use of a local server is standard practice in web development.


So, instead of accessesing your tour via file:///index.html, you would now be able to access it via the http protocol, via http://localhost/index.html in the address bar. This will solve your black screen issue when viewing your tour locally, and meets browser security requirements.

We recommend using Servez to serve your tour locally.

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