Create a drone virtual tour: the 2026 guide

This guide describes how an aerial virtual tour gets made from end to end, in the order the problems turn up. It is written first for drone pilots, but a venue manager will find enough here to judge a quote.

One rule before starting: the quality of a tour is decided at the recce, not in the build. No software rescues a badly chosen viewpoint.

1. The recce: choosing what to show

A place is not documented, it is told. Five to ten well-chosen viewpoints beat thirty exhaustive ones - a visitor faced with thirty thumbnails opens none of them.

Three viewpoints are almost always relevant:

• the arrival, which establishes the place and reassures about access;
• the heart, where people spend the most time - pool, clubhouse, terrace;
• the impossible viewpoint, the one no visitor will ever see otherwise: above the water, straight over the course, facing the sunset.

Do the recce on a satellite map before you come, then confirm on site: satellite imagery is often two years behind, and the new building is not on it.

2. Permissions: the part that takes the most time

This is what beginners underestimate most, and the only one that can cancel a job the day before.

In practice the simplest answer is organisational: fly early in the morning, on a closing day, or out of season. That avoids half the paperwork and gives you far more flattering raking light into the bargain.

Budget those lead times into the quote. An authorisation that takes three weeks and that you did not invoice is three weeks of cash flow gone.

3. The shoot: the settings that matter

Altitude first. Between 20 and 60 metres for most sites. Higher and you lose the detail and the sense of presence; lower and you no longer show the whole. A good rule: climb until the furthest thing you want to show enters the frame, then come down 20 %.

4. Stitching and resolution

The question to ask is simple: how many pixels per degree? It is the only metric that predicts whether your tour will hold up to zooming. You get it by dividing the panorama’s width by 360.

Angular density

33 px/°

Below 22 px/° - that is 8,000 pixels wide - the tour is sharp on opening and mushy the moment you move in. Above 33 px/° it holds on more or less any screen.

We set out that calculation in a dedicated article.

On formats, serious platforms accept JPEG but also PNG, TIFF and AVIF, up to 32,000 pixels wide. If you stitch on the ground, do not re-export to medium-quality JPEG: you lose in the print what you gained in the shoot.

5. The build and publishing

Import and tiling are automatic on a modern platform: you drop your spheres in and the tour is playable in a few minutes. The work that remains is editorial, and it is what separates a gallery from a sales tool.

1. 01

   Place the points on the map

   Satellite, or the site's illustrated map when it exists - often the best reference for the visitor, because they will find it printed on the spot.

2. 02

   Write the cards

   Zone name, capacity, facilities, and above all a link to the booking page. A tour with no path to action is a nice image, not an investment.

3. 03

   Set the starting point

   The first view is the one 100 % of visitors will see. Pick the one that makes people want to come, not the one of the car park.

4. 04

   Check it on a phone

   Half your visitors will arrive on one. An overloaded map or an over-long card shows up there immediately.

The five mistakes that cost you a second visit

1. Too many viewpoints. The client asks for completeness; you have to sell them the selection.
2. Unlocked exposure. Visible seams in the sky, invisible on the controller’s small screen, glaring on a desktop monitor.
3. Flying at midday. No relief, hard shadows, and usually people on the ground.
4. Forgetting the season. A campsite photographed in February sells badly in June. Set the flight against what the client wants to sell.
5. Delivering with no cards and no links. The tour ends up in a tab of the website nobody opens, and the client concludes that “it made no difference”.

The deliverable, in practice

A finished tour should come down to three things handed to the client.

If you deliver a file, you have delivered the raw material, not the product.