WPanorama

Displaying and browsing panoramic pictures properly is not an easy task for most image viewers, especially when it comes to displaying 360º panoramas.

WPanorama has been designed specifically to achieve that task in a meaningful and practical way regardless of the panorama dimensions, offering you the possibility of scrolling around the selected JPG or BMP image both horizontally and vertically in the most intuitive way.

This free utility comes with an impressive library of more than 4,300 panoramas for download from the most exotic and beautiful places in the world, though you can always use WPanorama to view and enjoy your own images. The program supports JPG and BMP files only, but it imposes no restrictions on the file dimensions or the width of the panorama. Actually, you can use this viewer to display any supported image, though the program’s true beauty lies in its extensive panorama-related functionality.

Unlike most image viewers, which usually take panoramas and make them fit their own interface or your screen in a desperate attempt to show you the entire picture no matter what, making them too short and small to let you enjoy the details, WPanorama offers you not only that option – useful to have a quick overview of the whole picture – but also the possibility to enjoy the image as an animation that reproduces the effect of watching a real panorama that stretches beyond your sight. Thus, the player comes with controls to scroll the image in either direction, to define the frames per second, the zoom percentage, the duration of the animation, etc. You can also change the image’s dimensions to make the frame as high as your screen, and thus appreciate all details better without losing the big picture.

Note that this is not a program to stitch your digital photos into panoramas, but to view already existing ones in a simple and convenient way. To make up for the lack of a panorama creation tool, this excellent program offers you the option to create screen savers and slide shows using any panoramic image. You can even add your favorite background music to them, and save these panorama movies into AVI video files, or turn your panoramas into a series of BMP screenshots. Finally, the screen saver creator will allow you to turn your preferred panoramas into high-quality and highly-customizable screen savers in no time.

WPanorama is probably the best free viewer that you can use to enjoy your panoramic images and those produced by other professional and amateur photographers and that you can download for free from the developer’s site, as no other image viewer can offer you a higher set of utilities designed exclusively to enjoy this specific image file format.