Using AutoStitch on the iPod Touch

This page describes how to use AutoStitch on the iPod Touch. Please click here for iPhone usage instructions. See also our tutorial video. You can get in-app help by tapping the Info button at the top right when using the application.


1. Upload Photos

Before you run AutoStitch on the iPod, you need to take photos using any digital camera, and get the photos onto your device. For best results, the photos should have a large overlap (e.g., 30%), and be taken from the same camera location. With a little practice, you will find it easy to snap pictures that overlap by remembering an object near the edge of one image that should also be in the next photo.

To upload the photos onto your iPod, you can sync with your computer (e.g. through iTunes), but the photos will be uploaded at a much lower resolution than the originals. To get high-resolution photos onto your iPod, you can email them to yourself (see FAQ for details). When you open the email in the iPod Mail app, you can press on the photo, and then press the Save Image button.

2. Select Photo Album

Start AutoStitch and select the photo album containing the photos that you want to stitch. If you have just saved the photos from email, they will be in your Saved Photos album. Photos that you sync-ed from your computer may be in other albums depending on how they were organized on your computer.

3. Choose Images

Tap each photo in the photo album to select it. Each selected photo will appear in the "Photos to Stitch" window. Loading a large number of photos can be quite slow, so progress indicators show when each photo has been loaded. If you are happy with the selected images, hit the "Stitch" button. You can remove an image by tapping it once, or remove all images using the "Clear" button.

4. Stitch Panorama

AutoStitch will analyse all of your images to find where they overlap. At the rendering stage, you will see parts of the panorama start to appear. You can browse around the panorama, even while it is rendering, by scrolling it with your finger and by pinching or double-tapping to zoom. If you're happy with the result, don't forget to save it to your Saved Photos album using the button at the top right. If you'd like to change the set of images or do a new stitch, you can hit the back button at any time.

5. Crop

Finally, you can crop the stitched result to any desired rectangle using the in-app cropping tool. This tool automatically selects the largest possible complete crop, but you are then free to further adjust the crop as you desire by touching the blue control points. Don't forget to save your final result.


Learning More

AutoStitch iPhone is built on the same novel technology that is used in several commercial image stitching applications. You can learn more about AutoStitch technology or even read detailed research publications on the approach by visiting the AutoStitch Research page.