Perhaps you’ve tinkered with photoshop’s panorama stitching tool and after the first time you never touched it again because the process is so time consuming and the interface was so sluggish. Wouldn’t it be great if it just worked automatically? It can. Check out autostitch. While this is more a proof of concept than a fully developed application, it works very nicely. Collect a set of images in a folder (no special naming conventions required), run the program, and tada, a relatively seamless panoramic image is created. It’s remarkable how well this works. It’s free for now (the product of research at the University of British Columbia) but they’re looking to license it. Who knows, it could end up in the next version of photoshop. I’ll use this to produce a couple of panoramas once I finally get around to posting some of my backlog of photography.

[update] First of all I forgot to mention it’s a windows-only tool. Second of all, I got around to testing it. Check out the page here in my gallery system – there are two examples of panoramas created with autostitch and then with the excellent panorama factory. The quality is basically equal – I’m really impressed with autostitch. For a free tool you can’t beat it. Panorama Factory has tons more features of course, so it’s not like I’m going to switch, but if you’re on windows and don’t care about quicktime VR output or don’t have the money for a copy of Panorama Factory this is a great tool.