Every photo in a tour gets a camera move, and the studio picks one for you the moment you upload. Here is what each of the six does, which room it suits, and when the automatic choice is worth overriding.
Open the Motion step and look at what was assigned. A push in suits a room with something at the far end worth arriving at, an orbit suits a room whose shape is the selling point, a pull out suits a space that reads better whole, and the two aerials are for exteriors only. Change anything that does not fit, leave the rest. The step itself is free: each scene costs nine credits when the tour renders, so the time to get the move right is before you generate, not after.
A photo tour is a sequence of still photographs with a camera move applied to each one. The move is the only thing supplying motion, so it is doing the work a camera operator would do on a real shoot: deciding what the viewer notices first, how long they sit with it, and what the shot is building toward.
Most agents never open this step. They upload, press through, and accept whatever was assigned, which is usually fine and occasionally wrong in a way that is obvious on playback and expensive to fix afterwards.
Two things are worth knowing before you decide anything. The first is that a move has already been chosen for every photo by the time you arrive. The second is what chose it.
When photos land in a tour, each one is classified by reading its file name for a room keyword: kitchen, pool, entry, backyard, primary bath, aerial, front. The room that comes back decides the move. A kitchen gets an orbit left, an entry gets a push in, a living room gets a pull out, a front exterior or an aerial gets a drone rise.
When the names carry no keyword, which is the normal case for IMG_4471.jpg or 260 Autumn Tide 4.jpg, there is nothing to classify. The studio then spreads four moves across the sequence in rotation instead, so each scene still differs from the one before it rather than every photo collapsing onto the same move.
This has a practical consequence most people never notice. Renaming your exports 01-front.jpg, 02-entry.jpg, 03-kitchen.jpg before you upload gets you camera work matched to the rooms. Uploading the camera's own file names gets you a rotation. Both are reasonable. Only one of them knows what is in the photograph.
The aerial moves are the exception that stays an exception: a drone rise is only ever assigned to an exterior, a backyard or an aerial, and never enters the rotation pool, because an aerial move on an interior reads as a mistake rather than a choice.
Screenshots are from the current Video Studio interface, captured November 2026.
- Push In. A stabilised dolly straight into the scene. Use it when there is a destination: a fireplace, a staircase, a window with the view in it. It is the strongest opening move for an entry, because arriving is what an entry is for.
- Pull Out. The same dolly backwards, revealing the space. Use it when the room is better understood whole than in part, which is most great rooms and most open plans. It is also the better closing move of the two, because it leaves the viewer with the whole thing rather than a detail.
- Orbit Left and Orbit Right. An arc around the focal point. Use these when the shape of the room is the selling point: an island you can walk around, a freestanding tub, a double-height space. Having two directions is not decoration, it is how two adjacent interiors avoid reading as the same shot twice.
- Drone Rise. An aerial rise. Exteriors, backyards, and the hero frame. It is the move that establishes a property in its setting, which is why it is the automatic choice for a front exterior.
- Drone Descent. An aerial drop toward the property from an elevated vantage. The counterpart to the rise and the better of the two for arriving at a property rather than leaving it.
- Vary the sequence, not just each shot. Every move can be correct on its own and the tour still read as a template, because six push ins in a row is a template. Look down the row and check that no move repeats back to back.
- Decide before you render, not after. Each scene costs nine credits when the tour generates, and changing a move afterwards means re-animating that scene for nine more. The Motion step itself is free, so a minute spent here is the cheapest minute in the whole process.
- Fix the photographs first. A move holds a photo on screen for several seconds instead of letting it be glanced at. A flat sky or a cluttered worktop that survives a scroll will not survive that, so correct the stills before you animate them.
- Watch the length as you go. The header totals the tour as you add scenes. A tour that runs long is almost always carrying rooms that did not need their own scene, and cutting one is better than speeding all of them up.
- Open with an exterior and close wide. A rise on the front of the house and a pull out on the best interior gives the cut a shape. The rooms in between are where you vary.
When it fits: A straightforward listing, named exports, and a tour going out today. The classifier is matching rooms to moves, and on well-named photos it is right more often than it is wrong.
Trade-off: Free and instant, and genuinely fine most of the time. It cannot see the photograph though, only the file name, so it has no way to know that your kitchen shot has nothing at the end of it to push toward.
When it fits: A flagship listing, or any tour where the sequence is going to be watched rather than skimmed. It takes about a minute for a dozen scenes.
Trade-off: The best result available here, because you are the only party who has seen the rooms. It is also the only approach that catches a move fighting its photograph.
When it fits: You already work in Premiere, Final Cut or Resolve and want keyframed moves with your own easing and timing.
Trade-off: Total control, and the only route to a move outside the six. It is a real skill, it runs to an hour or more per tour, and it does not scale across a week of listings.
When it fits: The property justifies a shoot, and a gimbal operator walking the space will always beat motion derived from a still.
Trade-off: Real motion through real space, which no photo tour reproduces. It costs several hundred dollars and up, and it has to be scheduled, which rules out a same-day launch.
Because a move is assigned automatically as soon as photos land in a tour. If your file names carry a room keyword, each photo gets the move mapped to that room. If they do not, four moves are spread across the sequence in rotation so that adjacent scenes still differ. Either way you can change any of them before you render.
Yes. The classifier reads the file name, so kitchen.jpg and IMG_4471.jpg take different paths: the first is matched to a kitchen and gets an orbit, the second has nothing to match and takes the next move in the rotation. It is the one input you control before any decision is made for you.
Only things in the photograph that would genuinely be in motion: water surfaces, foliage and clouds beyond the glass, sheer curtains near an open window, a fire that is already lit, a fan that is already running. It will not switch on a fire that is out or start a fan that is still, and the movement stays slow and secondary to the camera move. It is off by default and set per scene.
You can choose one by hand, but it is not assigned to an interior automatically and it rarely works. An aerial rise implies the camera is leaving the ground, which a room with a ceiling contradicts. The two aerials are for exteriors, backyards, and the hero frame.
Nothing on the Motion step, because no scene has rendered yet. Each scene costs nine credits when the tour generates, so a twelve scene tour is 108 credits. If you change a move after the tour has rendered, that scene re-animates for another nine, which is the whole argument for reading the step before you press generate.
Because the vertical export is a crop of the same master, and a wide shot centred for 16:9 loses its edges at 9:16. Reframe, on each photo card, lets you set a different crop per orientation, so the subject stays in frame in every format you export.
The move is assigned from the file name before you have looked at the storyboard. Agents who rename their photos get different camera work than agents who do not, from the same house.
Screenshots on this page were captured from the live Video Studio interface in November 2026. If the interface has moved since and this page has not caught up, tell us and we will re-shoot it.