For tours listed on Viator/Tripadvisor/GetYourGuide, it’s worth planning and taking photos that will help make your tour stand out to travellers. We strongly recommend including photos of people experiencing the tours. Here are some tips for taking great photos that we can add to your reseller listing:
Consider the best time of day for lighting and any logistical challenges you might face (like how busy the attractions might be). You can use your phone, but make sure there is plenty of natural light to make your photos attractive. Take photos of key attractions, including photos showing people taking your tour with a phone in their hands and headphones on.
These are the photo requirements for the resellers:
Landscape images only (not portrait/vertical)
Minimum of 1280 pixels wide
JPG, JPEG, PNG, or GIF file types (max 7MB each)
No photographer watermarks, logos, or readable license plates
No screenshots, photos of printed maps, branded bus routes, etc.
No selfies
No black-and-white images
Below are two great photos that meet the resellers’ criteria and help enhance the appeal of these self-guided tours in Toledo.
You need at least four images per product, but ideally, you should aim for 7-10 photos per tour.
Just to clarify, this is the image settings for voicemap tours that will then be promoted through third party sellers yes?
I ask because the actual audio guide images are 2048px x2075px which is pretty much square and not landscape.
So, when I am creating a tour I go around the route with my phone camera set to 1:1 (which is easy to then edit on your computer to the voicemap sizes). Then, when I do the tests with the robot voice and the final with my voice, I have my phone set to full size landscape and take more images going around the route as if I am a tourist.
Yes, I think @Brent is referring to photos that can be added to the reseller / OTA listings, primarily on Viator and GetYourGuide, which both recommend people actually experiencing the tour.
I had to chime in here because I happen to have a couple of photos of your account managers doing tours in Berlin, including one of @afriendinberlin’s tours. I think they’re good examples, mostly because you can see their headphones:
This is great timing…the newspaper here is doing a story on my tours here in Key West and I need to send them over some shots of people taking it. I’m going to set them up just like this. I’ll also update my listings with these new photos. Thanks guys!
@Brent@lisa I just did a photo shoot for some of these tours and tried to put a few of the pics in here, but I keep getting an error message saying ‘You can’t embed items into a post’…
Am I doing something wrong or is this a permissions thing?
Here are a few photos we took of ourselves doing our Baeza tour, which is about to be published. @Brent said it would be useful for me to post them here, so people have some more examples to look at.
So should we go back into our published tours and update them with a few photos of people taking the tour?
We use a professional photographer and a 360 camera plus drone for the final tour before publication, and then also use many of those unused photos for posting on our social media channels as well.
@baliwalkingtours, if you have photos that meet the above criteria (specifically for the reseller listings), please could you share these with me using a GDrive / Dropbox link? Some of these photos can be added to the VoiceMap locations, but they’re more useful if they’re used to make the tour more visually appealing on the resellers, where customers often aren’t as familiar with what self-guided tours are.
Any professional footage you have will be really useful when we get weeks 5 and 6 of the program and focus on promotional components, including social media marketing. But you can also share this footage with me at the same time as the images.
Thanks @Brent …here’s a few of the pics from my Key West photo shoot! A few of these will be featured in the local paper here next week…along with an article about IslandAudioTours.com
Thanks, @josh! Do you have these without the watermarks? Viator will likely reject the photos as one of their requirements is " No photographer watermarks, logos, or readable license plates."
!!