If you haven't seen our recent short post on PhotoGear 360 about how it all started when we bought our first 360 degree product photography turntable and a lighting kit, click here.

That's about the time when it became clear that there was a lack of a solid out-of-the-box 360 photography software that we could simply package with the 360 photography we kept producing for our clients. Most were mediocre and heavy Flash viewers that required a lot of efforts to configure and integrate and their support was often an issue.

That's how a combination of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer and our desktop authoring tool SpotEditor was born.

And this is what distinguishes WebRotate 360 software developed by us in house in Pasadena, CA - we spent endless hours shooting commercial 360 product images for several years and probably the same amount of time helping our clients integrate the results of our work to understand what it takes to achieve professional results.

Just wanted to give our readers a little inspiration by showing a few old images of our test 360 photography setups that we put together almost 5 years ago. Back then we were just starting with the concept of 360 product photography using our then brand-new Ortery equipment that we still use now and even some automated “cake-stand equipment” that has been long forgotten!

A lot has happened since then.. We recently estimated that we produced almost 300,000 images during these years and at least three of our Canon DSLRs went dead in between which is easy when you shoot 360-degree images non-stop for weeks in a row!

We had a lot of fun shooting 360 photography for Canon, Glock, Manfrotto and many others in the US and abroad – five years ago we probably had just a couple of serious competitors in the area so winning these projects was much easier. These days a lot of photographers are starting to offer 360 product photography as the demand increased dramatically (as probably everything else that has to do with e-commerce) and the pricing finally started to make sense for a lot of folks.

We will keep posting here some of our most unique setups that we often had to invent on these assignment but please don’t hesitate to ask any questions or tips and tricks and stay tuned for our upcoming release of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.5 which is a very big deal for all of us here at WebRotate 360.

We didn't plan to write a new post until we could offer you to download our new SpotEditor 3.5 but things have changed yesterday when we found out that the latest Firefox release (version 27) that came out yesterday, Feb 4th, 2014 broke 360 image rotation in all of our products that run the 3.5 beta script. With this Firefox update, the image rotation would lock up after you drag 360 images just for a few moments.

The 3.5 beta script is packaged with all our recent plugins including Magento, OpenCart, BigCommerce, WordPress as well as our Sharing script. If you are using our Prestashop add-in it's unlikely that you have 3.5 beta as we didn't have a chance to update it to 3.5 beta (though we did help some of you to install 3.5 beta script in Prestashop).

The place where Firefox 27 broke 360 image rotation was identified and it had to do with our special Firefox targeted functionality that eliminates image flicker during rotation when using larger images. It's a tricky piece of code that relies heavily on image events and it seems that Firefox 27 introduced a regression in that department.

We spent some time yesterday and cooked up a good solution that still keeps our flicker prevention module working as designed while addressing the issue with Firefox 27. All our downloads, plugins, etc that utilize 3.5 beta have been successfully updated yesterday and today and were re-tested everywhere.

If you have previously installed either of these, please download our 3.5 patch below and replace imagerotator.js included in the zip in your webserver installation under the imagerotator folder wherever it happens to be on your server (if you're not sure where it is, please let us know):

• 3.5 beta limited update
• Magento integration 3.5.x
• WordPress integration 2.0
• Any WebRotate 360 OpenCart integration
• Any WebRotate 360 BigCommerce integration

Or to make it simple, if you see inertia effect when dragging / releasing 360 images where rotation gradually slows down on release, or if you have a working full-screen feature, it's 3.5 beta. For the techy types, you can fire up your browser console (e.g firebug, etc) and see the 360 viewer version on page re-load inside the console.

Download patch »

If you are using our PRO script with Full-screen support, please contact us directly to get updated PRO-enabled 3.5 script.

Check out this new preview video of our latest version of WebRotate 360 SpotEditor v3.5. In this video we show just part of the new functionality related to our unique 360-degree image editing workflow designed specifically with the 360 product photography in mind. It includes our exclusive smart crop and resize tools, one of a kind background helper removal tool, immediate batch image preview and editing, quick path tools and more.

Using these fine-tuned tools, neatly assembled in one lightweight package will allow you processing your raw JPG images to create finalized 360 product views with a pure white background, including watermarks, interactive hot-spots published straight to your FTP in just a few mouse clicks:

It's not yet released, but please don't hesitate to request a beta (some of the features shown in the video are only available with our PRO license so please send us a confirmation of your PRO license purchase so that we could send you a full beta as shown in the video) or just subscribe to our newsletter that you can find in the right column of this blog to be first to know when this release is finally out!

March 07, 2014 - You can now download this Beta release for Windows and Mac OS X on our main download page under DOWNLOAD LATEST BETA 3.5

Other features being finalized for this release:

• New hot-spot indicator library tool to allow adding your custom hot-spot image indicators with ease.
• Hot-spots that activate on click vs hover.
• 360 degree spin and pan with mouse hover.
• Image labels to allow jumping / playing to referenced labels.
• New hot-spot actions with the ability to control 360 viewer functions such as zoom or playback as well as navigating to linked 360 views.
• Extensive API
• A set of pre-made publishing templates such as responsive design template, mobile template, API template, popup / lightbox template, gallery template.
• And a lot more.