Review: AutoStitch, create gorgeous panoramic shots right on your iPhone

[Version reviewed: 1.0]

One of the features that I miss the most from my Sony Ericsson k750 was the panoramic shooting mode. You could take up to three pictures and have the phone automatically stitch them together, and it even showed a ghost image of the last shot so that it was easier to line things up. AutoStitch for the iPhone doesn’t show any ghost images, but it does a hell of a job of creating gorgeous panoramas for very little trouble. Hit the jump for a quick guide and full review.

Load up the camera app. For best results I suggest you keep around a 10-30% overlap ratio on each of the photos you take — otherwise, just fire away. AutoStitch can accomodate up to 20 photos in portrait or landscape orientation, and it can add pictures vertically as well as horizontally. Just make sure to line things up nicely by turning slowly and evenly as you take each picture.

Load up AutoStitch and navigate to your pictures in the camera roll. Add the pictures in any order you like and then press the stitch button. Then sit back as the app seamlessly assembles your new panoramic shot — it takes about 20-60 seconds depending on how many shots you included. The resulting panoramic shot will be a little too large to view on the iPhone, so it’s best to just upload it straight to a computer. Don’t e-mail the shot either, unless you have a program that won’t compress it.

For all of its awesomeness,  AutoStitch isn’t perfect. It’s a buzz kill when you take three awesome shots and find out that the app just can’t put them together (it doesn’t tell you why, either), and there are some times when only two out of the three or four pictures you’ve chosen are stitched together…where did the other ones go? Were they just not pretty enough? It’s fair game if the app just can’t process them because they weren’t in line, but AutoStitch would score some real points if it actually told you this instead of making you guess at whether all of your shots were included in the panorama. The last little ‘error’ in the app is the jaggies in each photo where the stitching just didn’t go so well. In these cases, the photo is literally scarred and missing a portion of itself, but it’s nothing a little bit of copping can’t fix.

Despite my complaints in the last paragraph, I’ll be using AutoStitch religiously until something better comes along or I decide taking pictures is no longer fun (crazy talk, if you ask me). There are some definite downsides the app, but I guess I’m just so happy to have found a way to take panoramic shots again that I’m taking the bugs in stride. Besides, for the $1.99 asking price, is a piddlingly small price to pay for such panorama that just works (and looks good, too!).

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You can find AutoStitch on the App Store, which I just happened to have linked to here.