AutoStitch 1.0 is an iPhone photo-stitching app from Cloudburst Research. Photo-stitching is the process of combining multiple photographs to make a larger photo (typically a panorama). This can be advantageous when a scene is too large for the field of view of the lens(es) you have on hand or if you can’t back away far enough to get the whole subject in a scene.

AutoStitch’s performance is reasonable on a 1st-gen iPhone. If you try to stitch a scene with more than about 45 photos, AutoStitch will crash. I suspect that is a memory limitation of the phone, not a problem with the app.

When you first launch AutoStitch, you get a screen from which to choose the album that contains the photos you want to stitch:



You get to select individual photos once you’ve selected the album:



You’ll notice I took a photo of my hand. That is a handy way (pardon the pun) of easily finding the beginning and end of a sequence that you plan to stitch together. It can be hard to tell which photos are which from the small, square thumbnail images so having “bookends” speeds up the selection process. To select photos to add to the stitch, just touch them. They go into the well at the bottom of the screen:



When you’ve selected all the photos you want to include in a particular stitch, tap the “Stitch” button and away you go:







One nice feature is that the app displays the panorama as it’s building it, so you can watch it appear on your screen:





The scene I’m using in these examples isn’t necessarily a pretty one, but it does test the limits of the app. There is a good mix of strong lines and amorphous features. Here is the finished panorama stitched together from photos taken from one spot. In other words, I stood in one spot and rotated my body as I took the shots:



AutoStitch seems to use an algorithm that isn’t as sophisticated as one you would find on a desktop application. I wouldn’t expect an app for a handheld mobile device to be able to compete with a desktop app, so that’s not necessarily a knock against AutoStitch. Here is a section of the photo above, which shows that AutoStitch had some trouble with the items in the background like the pattern of the brick and the tree trunk:



Another area where AutoStitch had trouble was dealing with a linear capture sequence. In other words, instead of standing in one spot and rotating, I walked down the line as I took photos. The iPhone stayed perpendicular to the subject for all the shots.



The results are, as engineers would say, suboptimal.

My conclusion is that AutoStitch is a worthy photo stitching app for a mobile device. At the time of this review, it only costs $1.99 so you wouldn’t be risking a lot of money to see if the app meets your needs. It is a version 1.0 app, also, so there is a very good chance the publisher will improve upon the minor weaknesses I’ve noted above.