How many 360° photographs a space needs, and why floor area will not tell you
Nobody can give you a photographs-per-square-metre rule, including us. The count is set by how many positions somebody has to stand in to understand your building, and that is a property of the architecture, not of the area. What we can give you is what real buildings actually took: 4 for a bakery branch, 6 for a seafront shop, 7 for a self-service restaurant, 14 for a capsule hostel, 29 for a coastal campsite, 40 for a seafront hotel, 48 for a university building and 72 for an apart-hotel. Find yours between two of them.
What eleven real premises came to
Every number below was counted out of the delivered tour file, not estimated and not remembered. Every one of these tours is live and open in a browser from our published work, so you can walk the building and judge for yourself whether the count was right.
| The building | 360° photographs |
|---|---|
| An apartment in a Vlorë development | 4 |
| A bakery and coffee house branch in Tirana | 4 |
| A seafront shop on the Vlorë promenade | 6 |
| A second bakery branch in Tirana, same client | 7 |
| A self-service restaurant in Vlorë | 7 |
| A capsule hostel in Vlorë | 14 |
| A coastal campsite at Jalë | 29 |
| A seafront hotel in Sarandë | 40 |
| A university building in Tirana | 48 |
| A hotel in Budva, basement to third floor | 64 |
| An apart-hotel in Sarandë, sixteen apartments | 72 |
Seven apartments in one Vlorë development were shot as seven separate tours of four to six photographs each — never as one job, because each unit is sold on its own.
Why area does not predict the count
The cleanest evidence we have is one client with two premises in one city, the same brief on both. One branch took seven photographs and the other four. A 40 m² room with a high ceiling and eight sightlines needs more positions than a 200 m² hall you can read in one look, so a square-metre rate would overcharge the hall and undercharge the room. We do not publish floor areas for our own projects, for the simple reason that we did not measure them and will not print a number we cannot stand behind.
What actually drives it
- Sightlines and corners. One position covers everything you can see from it. An L-shaped room, a corridor with a turn, or anything with a blind corner needs a second.
- What has to be shown by name. A hotel that wants each room type walkable needs a position in each. One of our hotels shows seven rooms by their own numbers, which is seven positions before the corridors are counted.
- The approach. Some buildings sell on how you arrive: the parking, the road, the frontage, the beach at the end. One seafront hotel tour starts on the parking road for exactly that reason.
- Outdoors. A campsite has no walls to end a view on and no corridor to structure a route, so the positions have to build the route themselves. That is why 29 was right there and would be absurd in a shop.
- What the tour has to do beyond looking. A tour that only has to show a room needs fewer positions than one that has to let a stranger find their way through a building.
Estimating your own, in five minutes
Walk it and stop
Move through your building the way a visitor would and stop wherever somebody would need to stand still to understand where they are. Count the stops. That number is close.
Add one for every blind corner
Anywhere you cannot see the whole space from where you stopped, add a position. This is the step people miss, and it is the one that makes a tour feel complete rather than gappy.
Decide what has to be shown by name
Room types, apartment numbers, individual units. Anything a customer will be offered specifically needs its own position, or the tour cannot show it to them.
Price it, then check it against ours
Apply the rate card on the pricing page — €40 for each of the first ten, €30 for each one after. Then compare your count with the nearest building in the table above and see whether it looks sane.
Then send us the address and we set the final count with you before anything is booked, so the price is fixed and nothing is discovered halfway through the day. Ask for a count. The full version of this table — all seventeen delivered tours, including the seven apartments, with what each count had to cover — is in what your building will take; the pricing logic behind refusing an area rate is in why we price per photograph.
Questions people ask
- Can you tell me the count from my floor area?
- No, and neither can anyone else honestly. Area does not predict it: a small room with several sightlines takes more positions than a large open hall. We set the count on site, or from photographs and a walk-through description if you send them, and it is fixed in the quote before anything is booked.
- Does every room need its own photograph?
- Usually one, sometimes more, occasionally none. A small square room takes one position. A long, L-shaped or double-height room takes two or three so there are no blind corners. A room nobody will ever be offered or need to find may not need one at all — a hotel needs every room type, not every room.
- Can I add more photographs later?
- Yes. New positions are shot and built into the tour you already have, and the ones that have not changed are not re-charged. It is priced from the same published rate card as the original job.
- What is the smallest tour you build?
- Four 360° photographs. Below that it is a set of 360 photographs rather than a walkthrough — a different product — and four is where the published €160 minimum comes from. The smallest tours in our archive are four positions and they were the right answer for those premises.
