I recently embarked on a long term photography project I have titled “Virtual Rocky Mountain National Park”. The goal is to create 360° virtual tours of as many locations within RMNP as possible to allow people that may not be able to visit the park to enjoy some of God’s most magnificent work.
Virtual Rocky Mountain National Park is a work in progress I started in May 2025. Ultimately it will allow online visitors to experience dozens of locations within RMNP and its surrounding areas, in all seasons. The 360° interactive panoramas are all presented in high resolution, so viewers can zoom in and out to see details, and can pan fully around, including looking upward and downward. Dazzling views from the tops of Trail Ridge Road with its famous cliffs and 11,000 foot vistas will eventually be available, along with peaceful locations along trails and in well-known parts of RMNP.
Virtual Rocky Mountain National Park remains an ongoing and expanding online location experience, with updates and further coverage being added regularly. This link will take you to the launch page:
For example, let’s say I have a large (many many pixels) pano. Most probably not a 360 degree, but certainly around 180 degrees. From where California butts up against the Pacific Ocean.
Then what? Special website needed to share online? Is there a plug-in that works for a SquareSpace website? Etc. Etc.
You can not post your megapixel/gigapixel images directly online. There are a couple programs you can buy that do a conversion that lets you share them online. I use Garden Gnome’s Pan2VR to create my tours. https://ggnome.com/pano2vr/
Most of my photography work is creating 1-10 gigapixel wall murals with up to 90 degree to 120 degree FOV’s. Frankly, images beyond about 120 degrees start getting pretty distorted in a 2D space. (This Virtual RMNP tour is done in 3D space.) I will sometimes do up to 180 degrees but I almost always end up cropping off the ends down to no more than 120 degrees.
I have personally designed and developed my website using WordPress and self host it on BlueHost.com. Garden Gnome has a WordPress plugin that works with any WordPress web development platform. Last year I recreated my entire website in WordPress. Previously it had been written with Adobe DreamWeaver. However, I have not attempted using the plugin.
I have close to 100 different virtual tours (consisting of some 650,000 files,) of my wall mural photos uploaded onto my website server. I use FileZilla to do the upload when I create a new tour. Each virtual tour consists of dozens of folders and sub-folders with a few thousand small jpg files that are used to display the tour. For example, this Virtual RMNP tour currently has 3,360 Files in 1,172 Folders.
If you have a WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal website, then you can use the Garden Gnome package to embed your interactive projects.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, SquareSpace and other similar website development tools don’t play nice with the Garden Gnome virtual tours. You’ll need to purchase a third party web server subscription to host the Pano2VR app files, in addition to your Squarespace Subscription. This is because you cannot host the files on Squarespace. You’ll find many reasonably priced hosting services available.