I have been looking for information as to why the shooting order might be changed. The default is from top to bottom and left to right. What would be the purpose of changing this?

You can change the shooting order depending upon environmental factors. Some prefer to shoot ‘Rows Down’ because the movement seems more natural. This may be a better capture method for say, moving clouds. If you’re shooting buildings or trees that might have a change in shadow, then shooting ‘Columns Left’ may be desired. By default the GigaPans shoot ‘Columns Right’.

In one of his tutorial videos, Illah Nourbakhsh mentions that it is sometimes better to shoot a crowd (in a stadium for example) from left to right in rows, because people tends to move or change its position horizonatlly and not so much vertically.
Sounds logical to me.

My experience has also been that if there are lots of people moving around, you’re best off with left to right, rather than top to bottom. While neither is perfect, the left-to-right tends to handle moving objects, in my experience, better…

Another reason to do columns-down is a dusk pano where the light would get dimmer as you shoot. You could increase the exposure slightly with each column and not have obvious banding.

It should be mentioned, however, that this is not possible on all machines. I don’t think that the simplest version of the Epic does not have that capability.

Matthew, thanks for the reminder. Yes, the Epic Pro can shoot columns-right, columns-left, rows-down, rows-up. The Epic and Epic 100 can shoot columns right, rows-down, rows-up.