Publish and share

Preview before you publish

The Preview tab walks through the whole draft exactly as a visitor will see it: same hotspots, same minimap, same VR mode, without publishing anything or touching the live version. The top bar flags anything that would block publishing.

It is also the easiest place to set arrival views. Preview knows which room you came from, so when you walk into a room facing a wall, just turn toward what you want people to see and click Save as the arrival from…. Tuning a thirteen-room tour stops being form-filling and becomes a walk.

Publish on the platform

Publish freezes an immutable version of the tour in storage and serves it at /t/{slug}. The draft stays editable, and visitors do not see changes until you publish again. You can unpublish, or republish any earlier version, from the Versions tab.

Visibility options:

• Public: indexable, included in the sitemap.
• Unlisted: link only.
• Password protected.
• Organization users only: sign-in required.
• Restricted to embed domains: an allowlist of domains (frame-ancestors plus a Referer check).

You can also schedule a publish date and set an expiry date.

After publishing you get a public URL with deep links (#s=scene&y=120&p=-5&f=70&v=1), a QR code, a responsive embed code and Open Graph metadata with an image of the starting view.

Links to a scene and to a view

While someone looks around the tour, the viewer keeps writing the scene and the orientation into the address bar. That lets a reload keep the scene, but it does not pin the view: after a reload, the scene opens with its default view, the one you set in the editor with “Use current view”.

The orientation in a link is only applied when it carries the v=1 marker, which is what the viewer’s Share button adds. That way, sharing a link from the viewer shows exactly what you are looking at, and an ordinary reload never overrides the view you chose in the editor.

The link carries…	It opens at…
Nothing	The start scene, with its default view
#s=hall	The hall scene, with its default view
#s=hall&y=120&p=-5&f=70&v=1	The hall scene, facing that orientation

The embed code and the web component are covered in Embed a tour, and the steps for your LMS in Add to Moodle. Whether the tour shows the Made with Andarama badge depends on the plan you publish with: see The badge.

The public gallery on andarama.com

On the hosted instance, a public tour can also get its own listing page in the gallery, andarama.com/explorar/{slug}/, built so search engines find it by the name of the place. When publishing, turn on Show in the public gallery on andarama.com and fill in:

• Listing title, with the name of the place (“Chicago Cultural Center: 360 virtual tour”).
• Description: one paragraph of 300 to 600 characters, in a single language.
• Place and country, plus coordinates if you know them (if the tour already has a map, they fill in automatically).
• Attributions, if the photos are not yours.

The listing includes the embedded viewer, a full-screen button, the cover captured at publish time as the social image, structured place data (TouristAttraction or Place, with geo), and it goes into sitemap-tours.xml with its cover. If you change the visibility to anything other than public, the listing switches itself off; the text is kept in case you turn it back on. The index, andarama.com/explorar/, can be filtered by country.

postMessage API for the embedded viewer

The full reference is in Embed a tour.

// control the viewer from the host page
iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({ andarama: "goTo", scene: "classroom" }, "*");
iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({ andarama: "setView", view: { yaw: 1.2 } }, "*");
iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({ andarama: "setLang", lang: "en" }, "*");
iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({ andarama: "getState" }, "*");
// listen for events
addEventListener("message", (e) => {
  if (e.data?.andarama === "sceneChange") console.log(e.data.scene);
});

How the link looks when shared

Tour settings › Sharing the link controls the card that appears when someone pastes the URL into WhatsApp, X, Teams, Slack or your LMS, with a live preview:

Field	Purpose
Card title	Falls back to the tour title if left empty
Card text	Two lines: networks truncate
Site name	Your organization (“City Museum”)
Image	1200 × 630 px. Without one, almost no network shows a large card
Image alt text	Accessibility for that image
Card type	Large or small image (X/Twitter)
Site X account	@citymuseum
Declared locale	en_US
No index	Adds robots noindex, handy for internal tours

These fields are translated like any other tour text, so the card comes out in the language the link is opened with. The same metadata travels inside the exported package, so a tour uploaded to another host shares just as well.

Export a static package

Export builds, in your browser, a package that runs with no Andarama behind it: a ZIP for any web host, a single HTML file that opens with a double click, a version that keeps working offline (PWA/kiosk), or a SCORM package for your LMS. What each option does, when to use it and its limits are covered in Export: ZIP, single HTML, PWA and SCORM.

You can also automate publishing from CI with an API token (POST /api/v1/projects/{id}/publish) and receive publish webhooks.

Kiosk mode

For a screen in a gallery, a trade show booth or a lobby: the tour explains itself, and anyone can take over.

• It chains every guided route, one after another. It does not stop after the first.
• Each stop is entered the way a visitor would: through the step that links the two scenes, with that step’s arrival view. It waits the number of seconds set for the stop and, before changing scene, turns toward the door it is about to go through, so viewers can follow where it is going.
• When it finishes, it returns to the starting scene and waits, showing “The tour has finished” with a Watch it again button. It only loops forever if a route has Loop turned on (in the canvas, Autopilot mode).
• Whoever touches the screen takes control: “You are exploring on your own” appears, with a button to go back to the tour. If nobody touches anything for a minute, the kiosk returns to the starting scene; with looping on, it also starts again by itself.
• The list of routes is always at the bottom: tap one to start it.

How to set it up

There are three ways, and they all end up in the same place:

• When publishing, under How the link opens, choose Kiosk mode. The usual address (/t/your-tour) then starts in a loop, which is what you need when the lobby TV can only open one fixed URL. Republishing without changing anything keeps the mode; to undo it, choose Normal tour.
• With the kiosk link, always at hand in Share and on the final publish screen: it is the same address with ?kiosk=1. Use it to put one screen in a loop without changing how the link opens for everyone else. It works both ways: ?kiosk=0 opens a kiosk-published tour as a normal tour, in case you want to share it with someone.
• When exporting (Export › Kiosk mode), if you want a package that runs with no Andarama behind it (and, with the service worker, offline). See Export.