Carousel Spinner
Create a 360° view of your item

How to make your own product spinner

1. There are a few basic concepts involved in spinning a product.

• The first is that the camera MUST remain stationary. When the camera is stationary, the background scenery will not move. Only the product will move.
• The second concept is that the product should spin on its center. While it is okay if it spins a little off-center, spinning as nearly on-center as possible keeps everything in best focus and diminishes the wobbles.
• The third is that it takes 6 to 8 frames (images) to get a good sense of continuity when you display your photos in a spinner. Since it is easier to mark off quarter turns and divide those into eighth turns, I like to use 8 shots per item.

2. So to begin, we need three things.

• A rotatable base to set the product on. I like to use a lazy-susan or round disk on a spindle that can be spun easily. If you don't have one, you can simply mark a spot on the table with a piece of tape and keep your product on that mark as you turn it. With a disk, you can mark off the edge with quarter turns and divide those in half to make eight stopping points for your photos. Without the disk, you'll either have to eyeball the turns or you can mark off the angles on your table, and use your best judgement to rotate the item between shots.
• A stable camera. A tripod is the best way to make sure your camera stays on one place while you move only the product. If you don't have a tripod, then you may need a stack of books to bring your camera up to the correct level to view your product. The force required to press the shutter button is one of the main reasons a camera moves. So practice clicking firmly, but as smoothly as possible to prevent camera movement. And make sure your camera doesn't move when you reach over to rotate the product.
• A clear table with a blank wall or neutral backdrop behind it. You will be down low with your carousel to be at eye level with your product, so that means you will pick up all kinds of things across the room if you don't have some sort of backdrop.

3. Photo Prep

Set your Camera Image size

It is best to use your camera's lowest image size setting. That way you aren't filling your computer with giant photos that you have to shrink back down again. More camera pixels allow bigger PRINT photos from the drugstore, but do NOT translate into sharper web images. To shrink an image to fit on the web, all those extra pixels must be thrown away, so I generally set my camera to shoot 640x480 images, which is my camera's lowest setting. Some newer cameras only shoot as low as 1 or 2 megapixels, and you may simply have to deal with that and resize them afterwards.

For close shots of small items and collectibles, use your camera's Macro (closeup) setting. If you don't have macro and need to stand farther back to remain in focus, using your camera's lowest picture size setting may not be appropriate. In that case, you may need to shoot at a larger size so that, after cropping away a significant amount of background, your remaining image is still an appropriate size for viewing.

Crop and resize

If you can shoot your eight sides and avoid image editing, you are a few steps ahead. But in general, I usually need to at least shrink my photos from 640 down to something that won't overload the visitor's browser. With eight photos, the burden on the browser is multiplied by eight.

Crop: My first step is to crop the excess image. This is tricky because you have to trim every photo EXACTLY the same, so you may want to skip this step. For center-cuts, I use Clic*Pic (for Windows), preset my image size and shape, and then apply zoom-to-fill to automatically crop all photos identically as I drop them into the cells. Or I use free irfanView (for Windows), which has a cropper that remembers my settings, so I can apply the same crop to each photo.

Resize: The next step is to resize. The images in my sample spinner are 480 high, straight off the camera, and I cropped off the sides to make the images 480 wide as well, so I didn't feel I needed to resize them smaller - but I did so for the samples in this tool and this is where you would apply that step.

Compress: Then I applied a LOT of compression when I saved the file. I used 70% quality for these images because I want them to load quickly enough to start running when the user starts the spinner. eBay typically uses a higher 80% quality when they shrink and compress photos. By applying more compression (lower quality), I was able to get each photo down to about 25K in size. That means all eight photos will add up to about 200K bytes, which is tolerable for a spinner of this type. Also consider that a top view and bottom view of the item may be needed outside of this spinner.

4. The Carousel Spinner

The final step is to upload the set of eight photos to your website or online image host. Then add the image codes to this tool, which will generate the javascript code or css code for a spinner that you can add to your auction or website code. Only the CSS version is acceptable on eBay, and it will resize for mobile as well.