When we were in Argentina I started taking quite a few more panoramic photographs than I normally do because of this amazing software that I stumbled upon called autostitch. It’s nothing new. It’s been around for over two years but I, apparently, having been living under a rock. One of my favourite panoramic photos that I took was this one of the Iglesia San Francisco in the town of Salta. A wedding ceremony was being performed as we walked by so we snuck a peak inside.  It was packed with people and the lighting was magical.

Take a look at the larger image or the original image to see more detail – careful the original is over 20 megs!

It appears as though there is a good distance between me and the church but I was standing kitty corner seperated only by a street wide enough for two cars to pass by. I only had my Rebel XTi and a 50mm portrait lense with me, which is good for shooting in low light but not good for getting a wide angle, so I set the ISO to 800, stood back and started clicking away. 60 photos later I had a library of very detailed photos of every angle of the church.

At home I loaded up autostitch, tweaked a couple settings and a few minutes later I was blown away by the awesome photo that it had produced.

Last week I compiled all of my panoramas from the last few years using a great piece of software called Autostitch. Here’s one from Phi Phi Thailand in 2004:

One of the things I don’t like about Autostitch is that the resulting image has no EXIF data in it. So I set out looking for a way to take the information from the first image in the set and transfer it into the resulting panorama. I really wanted to be able to do this in ACDSee Pro because it’s my image manager of choice but after digging around it looks like it’s not possible even in the latest version. After some searching I did manage to find a solution though:

ExifTool by Phil Harvey

It’s originally a Perl script but there are Windows and OSX executables available to download. It’s a command line tool so you’ll have to extract it into a folder that is in your PATH.

ExifTool can do all sorts of various EXIF related tasks but the one I was interested in was copying the info from one JPG to another and that is achieved by doing the following:

exiftool -TagsFromFile STA_2319.JPG (image from) IMG_2319_pano.JPG (image to)

And it worked like a charm. It even created backups of the file that it was modifying. Sweet!