Next week I’m heading going to Bow Island, Alberta to speak at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference. Rarely do I get to squeeze a recreational element into my trips, but next week thanks to Jen Deyenberg I will get to do a little hiking in Calgary before the conference. It’s been six years since I last hiked in the Rockies so I’m looking forward to the opportunity. I plan to take a bunch of photos while hiking. And weather permitting I’ll get to capture some nice panoramas. To that end, I’ve installed three new panorama apps on my phone.

Camera 360 Ultimate has the most ratings (nearly 38,000) and highest average rating of the three free apps I’ve installed. The app offers fifteen photo effects and numerous gallery organization options. The panorama setting isn’t quite as smooth as the built-in panorama tool in my Samsung Galaxy tablet so I’m not sure if Camera 360 Ultimate will be my go-to app while hiking, but the effects options are nice.

Photaf Panorama makes it very easy to create a panorama by slowly moving your phone in one direction while snapping pictures. The downside to Photaf Panorama is that the free version only seems to work in landscape mode and there are a bunch of ads that pop-up while you’re viewing your pictures.

Panorama is a free app that does exactly what I want and not much more. To capture a panorama just tap the camera icon and slowly move your phone from left to right. You can apply three different effects to the images or just use the image as-is. You can share your panoramas directly to Facebook or Twitter from the app. In my limited early testing of the app, no pop-up ads appeared. This will probably be my go-to app while hiking.

The reason that I’ve committed to taking more pictures is to build up a library of images that I can use for my future presentations. I wrote about this recently in Project 365 – Now I Get It. In short, I recommend working with your students to build-up an image library for your classroom projects. The panorama apps could be quite useful for taking pictures of landmarks or store fronts in the downtown areas of your community.