Every method of producing a virtual tour is bounded by the photographs that go into it. None of them invent detail, so the cheapest quality improvement available is not a better tool, it is a slightly better shot list.
The good news is that the changes are small. Tour-ready photography is ordinary listing photography plus about twenty seconds a room.
The rule that matters most: coverage, not count
A room only supports a full turn in a finished tour when the photographs actually cover all four walls. Twelve photographs of the same corner is worse coverage than two photographs from opposite corners, so the useful instruction is not “take more photos”, it is “stand somewhere else”.
Two positions per room, diagonally opposite, covers most rooms. Anything L-shaped or open-plan wants a third. The coverage rule is drawn out in full here.
Light
Turn everything on, including lamps, and open every curtain. Interior lighting adds real detail in the corners, which is where dark and noisy patches otherwise show up in a panorama.
Avoid shooting straight into a window. The camera exposes for the bright rectangle, the room goes flat and grey, and no amount of processing recovers detail the sensor never captured. Stand so the main window is beside you rather than in front.
Height and level
Chest height, roughly 1.4 metres, and consistent from room to room. Tilting up makes ceilings loom and skirting vanish; tilting down does the reverse. Consistency matters as much as the exact figure, because varying heights between rooms makes a tour feel unsteady as you move through it.
What to remove before shooting
Bins, drying racks, toiletries, visible cables, and anything on the floor that reads as clutter. In a 360 tour this matters more than in stills, because a viewer can turn round and look at the corner you would have cropped out of a photograph.
Check your own reflection too. Mirrors and glass catch the photographer in a way that is easy to miss on a phone screen and obvious on a laptop.
Where the photographs go afterwards
This shot list produces better stills for the listing regardless. It also produces enough coverage for a tour, which is the point: with Spatia the same photographs become the tour, so the twenty seconds a room is the entire additional cost. No return visit, no 360 camera, and the tour can be live the same day the listing is.
Where coverage is thin, Spatia clips the view to the arc the photographs support rather than inventing the missing wall, which is why the shot list above is worth following rather than being something the software papers over. The routes compared by effort are here.