There have been some new security developments in Google Chrome recently. The latest browser releases can't load local files using asynchronous requests when testing published webrotate templates locally on your computer (i.e when they are not loaded from the Internet or your local webserver). We rely on these asynchronous requests (AJAX) in our 3D product viewer to load viewer configuration (xml) files.

Note that all works fine if the viewer is loaded from the Internet or your local webserver (e.g localhost / 127.0.0.1).

Good news is that Chrome has a special key that Google gives web developers and testers to bypass this security check and it's very simple to apply to your Chrome also.

If you are on Windows, go to your desktop and find Chrome shortcut. Make a copy of the shortcut for your webrotate tests and right-mouse click on it to bring up the shortcut properties. You will see that there's a Target field on the shortcut properties form, so just add the following to the end of the target path right after the closing quote (add a whitespace as well): 

--allow-file-access-from-files

Mine for example looks like this: "C:\Users\...\chrome.exe" --allow-file-access-from-files

It's more involved on Mac and we haven't tried it there yet but you can see how it can be done in this post.

Sept 2014 - Note that when you launch your local previews in Chrome from inside WebRotate 360 SpotEditor (v3.5 and up, Windows version), we pass this key to Chrome automatically so you don't need to go through the manual steps. Just make sure that Chrome is not running before you hit Publish in SpotEditor and unless the running Chrome instance was also launched by SpotEditor.

May 2015 - Opera has transitioned to Chromium recently, so you can now use exactly the same steps with the shortcut & key to make your local tests work in Opera too.

Sept 22, 2017 - the latest version of Safari 11 adds extra restrictions for the local previews of WebRotate 360 product views. To be able to preview your published work locally in Safari 11 and up, navigate to Safari's Develop menu and check "Disable Local File Restrictions" as shows in this screenshot.

Wanted to share this one here as every photographer will surely appreciate it! We just finished the other week 360 photography of the latest revolutionary product from Manfrotto - Sympla, which is a super cool, extensible PRO modular video rig.

If that's not enough, we used our latest stable 360 degree product viewer V3 to integrate it all with our new 'thin' theme, slick hot-spots, deep zoom and capabilities only v3 could do. Folks at Manfrotto already have it running on their website and I really like how it all worked out. Just click on the image below to see it in action!

We are really proud to work with the company that gave us so many reliable and innovative products that we use in our own 360 product photography studio every day.

Here's a few screenshots of the new SpotEditor beta that also includes our latest 360 product viewer build (beta v3). You can download it here and then run setup.exe under SpotEditor. Thank you to all our users who contributed their ideas and thoughts, and made this release possible.

As you probably noticed, SpotEditor has been pretty much rewritten from scratch. We have improved all workflows, added support for the latest viewer features and we are now flexible enough to accommodate cool new ideas we have in store for our next releases. Also, it's now almost ready for being fully operational on Mac OS via Mono framework (this will not be available until after we finally release v3).

Download our 360 photo software here and give it a try. As always we need your feeback!

Since many of you have requested, and while we are still ironing out some of your requested enhancements in SpotEditor v3, would like to share with you a release candidate of our new viewer module. What this means is that you can now try the cool features we have been working on in the last few months on your existing / test views and see if you like it and if it's worth the upgrade (we surely think so!). Below is a download link..

To apply updates to your test views just overwrite your imagerotator folder with the one included in this download, then add the following two lines to you pages before calling runImageRotator:

_imageRotator.settings.jsScriptOnly = true; // if you want to stop using Flash which is what this release is all about
_imageRotator.settings.graphicsPath = "imagerotator/html/img/basic";

You can check out out our new demos here. We also included our classic shoe sample that uses v3 that runs without Flash and which highlights the "deep zoom" and our new HTML-enabled hot-spots. Even though the new SpotEditor is not available for download yet (you can get it with the free download on our 360 product viewer page - released version 2.5.3), we hope that you can still try the "deep zoom" and new hot-spot styling via HTML/CSS using included xml sample as a reference.

Download

We're hoping to release SpotEditor v3 RC also within about week, so you may decide to wait until then if mingling with xml files manually is not your thing :)

The demo links have been updated on March 2nd, 2012 and now include latest SpotEditor tool, new features and fixes.