Six stations, shot at night, with the shop open
Turist Shop trades on the Lungomare, the seafront promenade in Vlorë. Its tour is six stations and thirteen navigation arrows, twelve of which lead somewhere distinct. It was shot at night with the lights on and the shop trading, because that is the hour it looks like itself — which also made it the hardest exposure problem in our archive. A small retail unit does not need forty stations and we did not sell it forty.
The counted figures
| What was counted | Figure |
|---|---|
| 360° stations | 6 |
| Total overlays | 13 |
| Navigation arrows | 13 |
| Distinct connections | 12 |
| Information popups | 0 |
| Distinct connections per station | 2.00 |
| Tour language | Albanian |
Counted out of the delivered tour file. Connections per station is distinct connections divided by stations — 12 ÷ 6 — and never overlays divided by stations, which mixes navigation and information into one meaningless unit.
Six, and why not more
The frontage onto the promenade, and the interior. That is genuinely what is there. A shop of this footprint has no rooms to link, no floors to connect and no route to explain, so every station beyond the sixth would have been another photograph of the same stock from thirty centimetres to the left.
Our unit is the 360° photograph and our rate card charges by it, so a longer station list is a larger invoice. That is exactly why the count has to be honest. Padding a small shop out to twenty stations would misrepresent the premises to anyone who opened the tour, and misrepresent the price of the work to the person paying for it.
The exposure problem, chosen on purpose
A lit interior open onto a dark promenade is the widest brightness range in our archive, and in a 360° frame there is no pointing the camera away from it: the bright side and the dark side are in the same photograph by definition. In a conventional photograph you frame away from the problem. In a 360° photograph there is no away.
The alternative was a daytime shoot of a shop that does most of its trade in the evening, which would have been an easier capture of a less accurate place. Standard colour and exposure correction is included in every price we quote; what a night frontage needs is more than that, and it was worth it here because the lit shopfront against the dark sea is the thing that makes somebody walk in.
Why the project page publishes no station list
All six stations in this tour carry the same name. Every other project page on this site publishes its station names as plain text outside the tour embed, because a list of room names is useful to a reader and legible to a search engine in a way that an iframe is not. Here that list would have been the same words six times, so the project page publishes none and says why.
Inventing six different names for six stations that the tour itself does not distinguish would have been a small lie in a spec table, which is where small lies in this industry usually live.
Density is not a quality score
Two distinct connections per station sits just under our archive-wide average of 2.15, computed across all seventeen delivered tours. Three of our apartment tours run lower — 1.50, 1.60 and 1.67 — and that is not a defect either. A four-room flat has fewer places you can go from the kitchen than a hotel corridor has. Connection density describes the shape of a building, not the effort in a tour, and any supplier quoting it as a quality metric is quoting the wrong number at you.
What a retail tour is actually for
- Showing stock and layout to somebody deciding whether to walk in. On a promenade with fifty frontages, that is the whole competition.
- Getting the inside of the shop into search and maps. Publishing selected panoramas to Google Street View is €10 per panorama and you choose which ones go — rarely all of them.
- Seasonal trade. A shop that lives on four months of the year has a website that has to work in the other eight.
- A link you can send. A tour is a folder of files on your own domain, so it goes in a message, a listing or a reply without anybody installing anything.
What it costs
€40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after that, and a €160 minimum, which is what four stations comes to — four being the smallest tour we build, because below that it is a set of 360 photographs and a different product. VAT on top. Travel is free within 25 km of Tirana and billed at cost beyond it, itemised and agreed in writing before anything is booked.
A six-station shop is two stations above the floor. Do the arithmetic yourself from the rate card; we publish our rates and our counts, and we never publish what a specific job came to.
Questions people ask
- How many 360° photographs does a small shop need?
- Often four to six. One delivered seafront retail unit came to six stations — the frontage onto the promenade and the interior — and that was the whole premises. Four is our minimum, because below four it is a set of 360 photographs rather than a walkthrough, which is a different product priced differently. If a supplier proposes twenty stations for a single-room shop, ask them to name what is at each one.
- Can you shoot with the shop open and customers inside?
- We shot this one at night with the shop trading, so yes in principle — but a 360° photograph captures everything in every direction, so anybody in the room is in the tour. That makes it a consent question first. In practice we work around the busiest hours and with staff who know the camera is there, and we plan that before the capture day rather than improvising it on site.
- Is a night shoot harder or more expensive?
- Harder, and not more expensive on our rate card. A lit interior open onto a dark street is the widest brightness range there is and every panorama contains both at once, since a 360° frame cannot be pointed away from the problem. Standard colour and exposure correction is included in every price we quote. What a night shoot costs is time on the day, and we would still recommend it for any premises whose trade happens after dark.
- Why does the project page not list the station names?
- Because all six stations in that tour carry the same name, so a list would have been the same words six times. Every other project on this site publishes its station names as plain text beside the tour, since that is useful to a reader and legible outside the embed. Where the source material does not support a list, we publish nothing rather than inventing names the tour does not use.
