Tour Flash: Automatically Build Your Virtual Tour in One Click
Zach Calhoon
Tour Flash is CloudPano's automatic tour builder. It looks at your 360° photos, figures out which scenes are next to each other, and wires them together with navigation hotspots — automatically. What used to be more than 20 minutes of manually dragging arrows between scenes becomes one click.
What Tour Flash does
When you run Tour Flash on a tour, it:
1. Analyzes the panorama images themselves — no GPS, no compass data, no metadata required. 2. Places each hotspot where the connected scene is really visible — arrows land on the real walkable path, not a random guess. 3. Aligns the north point of every scene so your heading stays consistent as you walk from room to room. Look north in the kitchen, step through the hotspot, and you're still facing north in the hallway.
The two modes
Tour Flash has two tabs at the top of the panel: Automatic and Connect Scenes. Most tours use Automatic for the bulk of the work and Connect Scenes to finish off the few links the analysis couldn't see.
Automatic(the Auto Connect Scene button)
Tour Flash analyzes every eligible 360° scene, detects which ones visually overlap, and builds hotspots for all the connections it can confidently detect. It also aligns each scene's north point so your heading carries over as you move between scenes.
The one-click path. Tour Flash finds and builds every connection it can confidently detect.
Connect Scenes(manual mode) Opens a panel where you link scenes by hand. Use this for any connection Tour Flash couldn't make on its own — for example, two rooms separated by a wall or a closed door.
Connect two scenes: drag the handle on a scene node to the scene you want to link it to. A line appears for the new connection.
Remove a connection: click the line (edge) between two scenes.
Up to 3 connections per scene. This keeps navigation clean and uncluttered.
Pan and zoom: scroll to zoom, drag the background to move around the map. Use the zoom buttons to reset.
Set the north point: each scene has North Point controls — rotate it 15° at a time (clockwise / counter-clockwise) so the heading lines up the way you want.
Hotspot style: pick the arrow/ring style for the connections you're adding, same options as Automatic mode.
Clear All wipes every connection on the map so you can start the manual layout from scratch.
Click Run Tour Flash to save your connections back into the tour.
Line of sight: the single most important thing to understand
Tour Flash connects two scenes only when they can actually "see" each other. The matcher works by finding shared visual detail between panoramas.
If you can stand at point A and see the spot where point B was shot, they'll almost always connect.
If B is hidden behind a wall, around a corner, up a staircase, or behind a closed door, there's no shared view — so Tour Flash leaves them unconnected on purpose rather than guessing wrong. That's not a failure. Those hidden connections are exactly what Connect Scenes is for.
Best practices for the most connections:
Shoot with overlap. Place your 360 shots so each one can see the next. Doorways, open sightlines, and shorter gaps between shots dramatically increase automatic connections.
Use 360° equirectangular photos. Tour Flash only analyzes standard 360 still panoramas. It automatically skips 2D scenes, product/vehicle spins, videos, cube/stereo/little-planet/dollhouse scenes - those stay in your tour, they're just left for manual connecting.
Default to the Floor hotspot style. The Floor Ring style sits flat on the ground exactly where the connected scene is, which reads the most naturally for walkthroughs - we recommend it for Tour Flash tours.
Use Connect Scenes for anything hidden. Walls, corners, stairs, closed doors link these by hand. It takes seconds.
Keep the tab open and let it run. Don't switch away mid-analysis.
Re-run freely. Tweaking your scenes and running again is cheap (see Credits below).
Hotspot styles
Pick the look of the navigation arrows before you run:
White Arrow / Black Arrow — classic floating directional arrows.
Preview Bubble — a small preview thumbnail of the destination scene.
Floor Ring — a ring on the ground where the next scene is (recommended).
Custom Icon — upload your own icon from your asset library.
You can also choose to clear existing hotspots before connecting (start clean) and clear panorama scene names if you want Tour Flash to rebuild everything from scratch.
Results
When it finishes you'll see a summary:
Scenes connected (out of eligible scenes)
Connections created
Hotspots placed
Any scenes it couldn't connect automatically — listed by name so you know exactly which ones to link with Connect Scenes.
Credits
New accounts start with 5 Tour Flash credits.
1 credit = 3 runs on a tour. The first run of every three costs a credit; the next two are free. So you can run, review, tweak, and re-run without burning credits each time.
Your remaining credits are shown at the top of the Tour Flash panel, and Buy More Credits is right there when you need them.
