How to use pins in SiteTube to quickly find nearby panoramas

Most of our customers use their xBot to capture multiple 360° panoramas across their mine site each day.

That can include different areas of the pit, the ROM, stockpiles, tailings dams, haul roads or other important locations.

When you have several panoramas from the same day, a list of file names isn’t always the easiest way to work out which image covers the area you need.

That’s why SiteTube shows each panorama as a pin in its actual location on site.

You can navigate between them from either the 3D panorama view or the bird’s-eye map. Hover over a pin to see the location name, then click it to open the panorama captured there that day.

It gives you a more visual way to organise and navigate daily mine-site imagery.

This video shows you how it works:

1. In SiteTube, open a panorama.
2. In the 3D panorama view, you’ll see blue pins showing other panoramas that were captured on the same day.
3. Hover over a pin to see the location name.
4. Click the pin to open the panorama captured there.
5. You can also use the bird’s-eye map in the bottom left-hand corner of the page to see all panorama locations across the site.
6. Hover over any pin to identify the location, then click it to open that panorama.

Instead of scrolling through image files, you can use your view of mine itself as the way to navigate the day’s panoramas.

Ways to use this at your mining operation

When you capture panoramas across several parts of a mine every day, keeping that imagery organised becomes more important.

Someone looking for images of a particular pit stage, stockpile or piece of infrastructure will often know where it is on the mine, but not what the corresponding image file is called.

The pins give them a simple way to visualise all of the panoramas available from that day.

Find the image you need faster

If panoramas have been captured across the pit, ROM, stockpiles, roads and other areas of the operation, you don’t need to open them one by one to work out which one you need.

The bird’s-eye map gives you an overview of all the capture locations, while the 3D view lets you move between nearby panoramas as you look around the site.

This becomes especially useful as the number of regular panorama locations grows.

Make site imagery easier for other teams to use

Your survey team may be familiar with the file names and capture locations, but that isn’t necessarily true for everyone else on site.

People across survey, geotech, planning, operations, maintenance and environmental teams, including those working remotely,  can log into SiteTube and easily navigate by locations they already recognise on the mine. 

They don’t need to know how the imagery has been named or filed to find the area they want to look at.

A more visual way to navigate your daily site images

When your xBot captures the same locations every day, you quickly build up a useful visual record of the mine.

Pins make that growing library easier to work with by organising each day’s panoramas around where they were captured.

And once you have the right panorama open, you can use other SiteTube tools such as the side-by-side comparison view to see how that same area has changed over time.

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