Your account starts with five tutorial locations and a sample project already built. They use real locations and real photos, so what you learn on them carries over to your own work.
Work through them in order. Each one introduces something the one before it did not cover.
Tutorial 1: Altadena Ranch, getting around
Open it from the Locations page and use it to learn the viewer:
- Switch between the card, gallery, list, and map views
- Step through photos with the arrow keys, or swipe on a tablet
- Open a photo full screen, then zoom and pan into the detail
Nothing here writes any data, so this is the one to click around in freely.
Tutorial 2: Modern Villa, editing and distances
Edit the location and correct its address. Save, and the card updates straight away.
The address does more work than it looks. LocoBase geocodes it, drops a pin on the map, and measures the drive from your production office. A location with no address still works; it just will not appear in map view or in any distance-sorted list. An approximate address beats no address.
Tutorial 3: Zen Garden, projects and script locations
This is the idea worth slowing down for. A script location is a place in the script, like the main house. The locations you file under it are the options you are putting forward for that place.
Open Tutorial Project: LA Shoot and look at how it is already built:
- Script Location 1: Main House holds two options
- Script Location 2: Remote Hideout holds one
- Script Location 3 has no name yet, which is what a script location looks like before you have decided what it is
Add Zen Garden to a second script location and you will see that one location can sit under several at once. That is normal rather than a mistake: a house that could play as the main house or as the neighbour's belongs under both.
Tutorial 4: Lake Clearing, AI tagging
Run Analyze Images on its photos. The tagger reads each photo and proposes tags for environment, category, rooms, styles, and features, with a confidence score on each one.
Two things to know before you run it. Every photo analysed spends one image read, and a free account has 100, so this is not a button to hold down over a 400-photo library. And the tagger proposes rather than decides. It is dependable on room types and materials, weaker on style labels, which are subjective enough that two scouts would disagree as well. Read what it suggests and drop what is wrong before you save.
Tutorial 5: Desert Canyon, sharing
Share it by email and add a note for whoever you are sending it to. They get a link rather than a signup prompt, so a director can look without creating an account.
If they do sign up, the referral system credits both of you. Referrals and the Expert Advisor Program covers how that works.
When you are done
Keep the tutorials or delete them. They count against your location limit either way, and a free account allows 15, so most people clear them out once their own library is started.
Where to go next depends on what you have already:
- Import Your Existing Location Data and Photos if your locations live in a spreadsheet or a SmugMug library
- Creating and Managing Locations to add the first one by hand
- Adding Video to a Location to put the walkthrough where the stills are
- Share Projects with Your Team once you have something worth sending out