Best Panoramic Photo Apps

This is the essential panorama shooting app. It is so simple to use -- simply point your camera and start panning slowly. You are not just limited to left and right -- you can pan up and down as well to capture the entire scene. You can crop and share your panoramic creation from right inside the app, or save it to your camera roll. It is free, and it does the job. Just download it and give it a shot!

I put this one is the essential category as well, because it does beautiful panoramas but in a different way. I keep both of the essential apps on my iPhone so that I have the flexibility to create panoramas while shooting (with Photosynth) or after the fact, with Autostitch. Simply use any camera app, even the native one, to shoot a series of photos that overlap in some way. Shoot left, right, up, down, whatever you like. Then you open up Autostitch Panorama and the app stitches them together for you. The results look great, and this method may appeal more to those that like to shoot first and edit later.

Another very worthy free app that I can’t quite delete from my iPhone is Dermandar. It takes left-right (but not up-down like Photosynth) panoramas. Dermandar is notable due to its fun yin-yang animation, which helps you improve your panoramic shots by letting you know when you’re panning too fast. This makes it both easy and fun to shoot excellent panoramas.

This one takes gorgeous 360 degree panoramic photos in seconds. It’s universal, so you can actually use your iPad camera if you prefer. In fact, for iPad users, this is the essential app. They also offer a cool sharing site, so you can upload your photos and view panoramas shared by others.

One of the first panoramic shooting apps in the app store, Pano is still a great option. Not quite as quick to use as Photosynth, it does have a feature that some people may find especially useful. Pano has a semi-transparent guide to help you line up your photos just right. For those who want to shoot live but value precision over speed, this is another option.

And now, for something totally different. This takes something between a video and a photo -- it doesn’t move but it does have sound. You spin the photo around with your finger to see the whole thing. One really cool feature is that you can turn the camera around on yourself to record a 360 degree shot of your face with the world spinning behind you. But where it falls short is usefulness. You can ONLY shoot 360 degrees -- sometimes you don’t want the entire circle. Also, you don’t have a simple photo you can save. You can share your creation to their website, or even to friends with an iPhone, but your friend must have the (free) Sfera viewing app (see link below) in order to be able to see it.

This is not strictly a panorama app, though you can use it that way. This one is intended more to take 360 degree views of some object, for example, an item you want to sell online. YouSpin360 takes a series of time lapse photos, and voice prompts tell you when to move the camera each time. Unfortunately you can’t save the shots to your photo library, but you can share them a variety of other ways, such as their website or Facebook. I would suggest trying out the free version if this intrigues you; you can always remove those pesky ads by buying the paid version (link below).