Creating "Steerable" Panoramas with MGI Photovista

Creating panoramas with MGI Photovista is pretty straightforward, and the online help is adequate.

Photovista also lets you create a 360 panorama viewable through a steerable window. For some purposes this is preferred to the wide view of the whole panorama.

These are pretty easy to make, but the online documentation is pretty sketchy. Here is the procedure for making a steerable panorama.

Photovista gives you several alternatives of viewing software. For web purposes, I highly recommend choosing the Java viewer, as this means that visitors do NOT need to download and install any special plug-in software for their browser.

You don't need to know Java to use the Java option. MGI Photovista will do the work for you.

  1. Open your panorama in MGI Photovista.
  2. Click File > Save As.
  3. In the File save window, in the Export to HTML box, choose "for Java." Check the box that says "Web preview." Enter a file name in the usual way and save.
  4. This will create three files: the jpg, the ivr, and a file called panoapplet.jar. Copy these files to the same directory as your web page. Step 3 will also open a preview of the panorama in your web browser, with instructions of how to modify your web page to display the image. Just view the source file of the web preview page and copy the obvious lines into your own HTML.

That's it!

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