Gated Virtual Tours and Object Removal: New Features for Listings

A gated virtual tour asks each viewer for their name, email address and phone number before the full tour opens, and every viewer who verifies their email becomes a lead in your dashboard. Object removal erases small unwanted things such as cables or clutter from listing photos and tour panoramas, while AI Enhance handles bigger removals like furniture, people or a car on the drive.

We built these features, along with blurs for privacy, around the three needs agents and photographers asked us about most: getting leads from a tour, editing photos themselves, and keeping private details out of what they publish.

Removing Small Objects From Photos and Panoramas

Object removal sits in the Still Photo Editor and in the panorama editor in Content Studio. You paint over the object with a brush sized to fit it, tidy the selection with the eraser if a stroke strays, and select Remove Object. The tool is made for small things: cables, clutter, a misplaced item, seasonal decorations such as a Christmas tree, or personal and sensitive items, to leave a more neutral room. Large selections come out less cleanly, and the editor tells you when a selection is too big to remove well.

The same brush works on each panorama of a virtual tour. Once you save, the panorama is reprocessed, and the change appears in the tour when processing finishes, without a reshoot. Projects created before 1 January 2025 have panorama editing switched off for technical reasons; you can request edit access, which is granted within an hour.

Minor damage such as a small hole in the wall or a scuff can go the same way, but only when the repair is planned, since a buyer at the viewing should find the room they saw in the tour.

When the Job Is Bigger Than a Brush

Furniture, people, vehicles and bins are too large for the brush. For those, AI Enhance has a Remove objects tool with set options: declutter, remove all furniture, remove vehicles, remove people and remove trash bins, plus a custom option where you describe what should go. Photo editors call this virtual decluttering. Its versions land in an AI Enhanced tab while the original stays as it was under Originals.

Check each result before you use it. Generative AI can change more than you asked for, including the shape of windows, doors or walls, and a result that changes the building shows buyers something that isn't there.

Every AI Enhance result carries a Digitally Altered watermark by default, and the same label can be added to photos cleaned up with the object removal brush. You choose where it sits and can change its wording. It supports disclosure duties such as the EU AI Act and California's AB 723. The rules differ by country, state and listing platform, though, and some MLSs have their own photo rules on how an edit is labelled. Checking which apply to a listing stays with whoever publishes it.

Keeping Private Details Out of the Tour

In photos and tours from a Giraffe360 capture, people's faces, posters showing people and car number plates are blurred automatically. For anything else, such as family photos, you add a blur mask to the photo or panorama yourself, shape it around the area and set how strong the blur is. A mask can be copied to other photos or panoramas in the same project.

Blurs show in the editor's preview straight away. On panoramas, reprocessing takes between 5 and 45 minutes, depending on how many panoramas have masks.

Turning Tour Viewers Into Leads

Every Giraffe360 tour has a main link, published or unpublished, and can also have a gated link and a protected link, each with its own address. The gated and protected links are the ones that collect leads.

A gated link opens on the tour's first view. When a viewer tries to go further, the contact form appears, and a verification code goes to the email address they give. Entering the code opens the whole tour and registers the viewer as a lead in your dashboard. To set one up:

1. Open the project and select the menu button on the virtual tour card.
2. Choose Tour link and find the Gated Tour section.
3. Change its status to Published.
4. Tick the consent box, then select Publish.
5. Edit the link's slug if you want a readable address, then copy and share it.

A protected link gives viewers a preview first. They see up to three panoramas: the start view and the next two reachable from it, or the highlighted panoramas you pick in the virtual tour editor's settings. After the last of them, the lead form appears. Submitting it sends you the lead, and you decide whether to reply with a temporary full-access link, which stays valid for 3 days. You can create as many of those as you need while the protected link is published.

Leads from both arrive by email to the person linked to the project and in the Leads section of the dashboard, with each viewer's contact details. New leads are listed first, and you can filter them by project, by date and by whether they came from a standard or a gated tour.