Starting View of Published Tours

[jimsalabim]

Hey guys,
this has always been a quite annoying issue to me: Google does´t seem to receive the meta data for the correct starting view ("Startansicht" in German, I don´t how how exacly it´s called in the English version). It used to be that way that Google by default made north the default stating view, but now I have the feeling it´s just random. Does anybody have a trick how to set the starting view?
Thanks,
Daniel.

[Hopki]

Hi Daniel,
The last time we tackled Google about this, it depends on where you open the tour, for example, it may be different if you open the tour from your account to that of opening it from Google Maps.
But Google says this is a "feature", not a bug.
Regards,

[jimsalabim]

Wow, that´s quite optimistic to call that a feature, since the only person opening my tour from my account is - me!
So is it true that the starting view is random when opening it from Goolge Maps? (Which is the customers default "opener")?

[Hopki]

Yes, this was the message back from Google.
However, I guess they mean when you upload, you get a "fixed" random view.

But the fact you can get different starting views depending on where you open the tour is just odd.
Have you tried the starting views from the embed code?

To let you know what we also tried, when you set a Default View, not only do we upload the metadata, but we also remap the image so the default view is at pan angle 0.
Regards,

[jimsalabim]

Yes, I usually shoot in my first picture in the default view, which usually results to being that view angle 0, as long as I don´t cvhange anything in PTGui. But still...Google chooses other angels as starting point.

[Hopki]

Yeah, as said we also remap the image on upload and set the default view to pan angle 0, but still not what you see.