Taking an ultra-wide photo with an iPhone 17 Pro in portrait orientation

TidBITS Talk
1

I wish to take an ultra-wide photo destined to be in landscape format. I want to hold the phone with the long edge vertical. Is this possible? If so, how?

2

I thought maybe iPhone rotation lock would work for that, but no, in the Camera app it still rotates the view. Maybe a third party app would honor rotation lock?

Otherwise you’d just have to take the phone vertical and rotate the picture to landscape afterward, I think.

3

Thanks for your comment. Holding the phone vertically in ultra-wide ends up taking a picture which includes my feet and the chandelier above my head. Oh well!

4

I’m not confident that I understand, nor do I have an iPhone 17, but maybe 65x24 would do the trick.

1 Like
5

Thanks, but my concern was the apparent inflexibility of the native 17PRO camera. I usually want to hold the phone in the ”vertical” orientation, and the camera app won’t let me.

6

A ChatGPT query for this turned up “One well-known example is Horizon Camera for iOS. It “automatically keeps widescreen videos perfectly horizontal … hold it upright, sideways or even keep rotating it … your captured moments will always stay horizontal.””

7

I have an app called ProCamera and it has a setting where you can lock the rotation so that when you rotate the phone to vertical it will still take landscape shots.

I can’t find any way to do that with the built-in camera app, so a third party app is the only solution. But most are free to try, so I’d explore them and see which you like.

8

Given that I’m unlikely to be able to justify the cost of an XPan… I much enjoyed paying the 12 bucks for 65x24, a nicely done app.

9

The PANO mode in the 17PRO works fine for me when stitching to achieve extremely wide shots. Shooting wide angle uses the lens of the same name and shoots a single exposure with no stitching. When held vertically the result is feet-to-chandelier, and when held horizontally the result is marvelously wide. I want, and cannot have, the ability to use that lens held vertically with a marvelously wide horizontal result. Still it is an amazing camera.