You’re missing out on your Pixel 10’s best camera feature

When Google announced the Pixel 10 series, a lot of focus was given to the new 100x Pro Res Zoom as the highlight camera feature, with Camera Coach taking the second seat. What went under the radar is Google’s continuous work on Panorama mode, which today is absolutely amazing and has finally reached its full potential.

I’ve been using my Pixel 10 Pro XL as my main camera for a couple of months, including a short trip to Athens and some sightseeing around France while my parents were visiting. Here’s what makes panorama mode amazing on this phone and why I think people are sleeping on it.

The Pixel 10 Pro’s panorama mode can finally do it all

Each time I switch to the panorama mode on my Pixel 10 Pro XL, I’m happy to see the versatile options Google has been adding. We can now switch between 1x, 2x, and 5x zoom before starting to pan, which helps me tailor the shot to the scene I’m looking at.

If the entire view is interesting, I can keep my camera at 1x and pan to capture it all. But if the lovely view is further away with a lot of uninteresting or distracting elements above and below, I can zoom in to 2x or 5x and narrow down the shot to capture a more focused panorama. Don’t get me wrong, all of these panoramas are beautiful views, but it depends on what you want from your photo and what you prefer to emphasize. It’s the versatility and choice that I appreciate so much.

I love this for the faraway skylines of cities and towns. I also use it a lot to create more detailed panoramas that highlight very specific parts of a scene. The versatility is insane, and each time I use it, I’m in awe at the results. Just have a look at these three examples of the Greek coastline seen from Aegina, the Palace of Versailles, and the Parisian skyline from Montmartre. Zooming in allows me to skip the ugly fence in the first one and the crowds in the second and third, all while putting the accent on the details of the coast’s or city’s vastness and the castle’s ornamental details.

Besides support for three levels of zoom, the panorama mode finally works for vertical shots, too. I discovered this by mistake a few weeks ago; my Pixel 9 didn’t have it last time I checked, and Google was supposedly working on it. I don’t know when it was added, but it’s now fully functional. Just switch to panorama mode, hold your phone in landscape mode, and you can now pan upwards. It’s perfect for tall shots like these Temple of Poseidon columns.

On top of this, Google has improved the resolution, stitching, and HDR smoothing of panorama shots, which allows me to capture more challenging scenes with overexposed and underexposed areas, complex details, and even moving crowds. All of this without too many artifacts. Of course, the result would be better if I took every shot separately and did a lot of Photoshop/Lightroom work with exposure stacking and stitching. Clearly, though, the automatic photo is more than excellent and more than enough for the few seconds it takes my Pixel to process it.

Google had criminally neglected the panorama mode, despite having a far superior still photo experience in every other category. It only allowed pano captures with the primary lens at 1x, and then saved the shots in a super low resolution that criminally missed out on detail. My Pixel 7, for example, captured the same scene as a 5MP shot versus 20MP+ on the iPhone. It wasn’t even close, despite the iPhone handling HDR and colors far worse.

The result was so unusable that I always resorted to the wide-angle shot to capture beautiful landscapes, choosing distortion and excessive foreground/sky over the bad low-res panorama shot. That, or I took several individual shots and viewed them in succession to pretend I had a larger single photo. (I always hoped I’d stitch those in Photoshop, but I never had the patience to do so.)

All of the excellent lenses, zoom capabilities, and HDR smarts of the Pixel 6, 7, and 8 were clearly lost in panorama mode. But Google started fixing that with the Pixel 9 series. It first implemented the new, more precise, and more intuitive panorama UI, and it started generating higher-resolution shots. The difference was drastic, and it immediately made me fall in love again with shooting landscapes on my phone as opposed to using the wide-angle lens or taking individual shots.

Now, with the Pixel 10 series, we have the zoom capabilities, vertical panoramas, and even higher resolution shots, and I can finally rely on this mode to snap the beauty of the scenes I see. If you’re not using it or you had given up on it when it was bad, it’s time to switch that Pixel camera to Panorama and give it a whirl. I hope Google also rolls out all of these improvements to previous Pixels in a quarterly drop soon. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have it all.