Summer has waned. The children are back in school. Some of you may be looking back at the vistas in your summer holiday photos and already plotting the next getaway.

If so, there is one kind of app to take along on your next vacation, especially if you found on a summer trip that the viewfinder on your smartphone was not doing justice to the beach scene, country landscape or sweeping cityscape in front of you. Known as panorama apps, these programs help stitch together multiple or moving snapshots of a view to create a wide-angle image that will do a better job of conveying a sense of scale and place than a single photo.

Using DMD Panorama is a fabulous way to learn about panoramic photo-taking because its interface makes the task simple. You simply tap the “capture” button, choose whether you want the app to auto-expose the image and whether the flash should be on, then hold the camera up to the scene.

The phone snaps the first part of an image, then you turn it to one side to capture the next piece, and repeat. The app has a small logo on the screen that helps indicate when you have turned far enough for the next part. DMD then stitches the images together with some complicated math so that you almost cannot spot the seams in the final picture.

The app also makes it easy to save a panorama to your phone or share directly to social media like Twitter. The resulting photos can be enormous — as much as 40 megapixels. If you don’t want your phone’s precious memory eaten up by such large images, the app offers free cloud-based storage, as well as a social sharing option. The app even has an option that turns panoramas into short videos that show the whole scene, perfect for sharing on Instagram.

The app costs $2 on iOS and $5 on Android. To capture full high-definition images, it costs an extra $2.

On Android, there is an app with many of the same features, called Panorama 360. It’s free, so it’s worth trying if you don’t like DMD.

For a quirky alternative, check out PanoSelfie. This free panorama app uses the front-facing camera of an iPhone to take wide-angle panoramic selfies. This means you can appear in your own snapshot of some stunning scenery or take panoramic portraits of a group of people you are with.

As with DMD, you hold the phone up and spin it from side to side, following onscreen prompts that remind you to move smoothly and tell you when you have rotated far enough. It helps that you can see yourself in the scene as the image builds up. The app’s algorithm does a good job of stitching the images together, and it does this without distorting faces too much. The interface is easy to use, letting you control basic image qualities like brightness, noise reduction and how wide an angle you shoot.

PanoSelfie has drawbacks. It is iOS only and is ad-supported, so pop-up ads may suddenly appear. You can disable those by spending $1 in the app.

Then there is my favorite: 360 Panorama by Occipital. Its interface guides you through making panoramas, and the app includes extras like cloud storage, social sharing and an in-app panorama viewer. It also has one big bonus: the ability to create spherical panoramas. This means you capture the entire scene around you — up and down, left and right — and you can view the results either as a long, strip-like photo or as a circular projection that is absolutely stunning.

This app makes great images, but it may take some practice to perfect your skills. It costs $3 on iOS and for Q10 and Z10 BlackBerrys.

Most panorama apps require you to stand still, spin accurately on the spot and try not to jiggle the phone. Things are simpler with an app like Circular Plus, which costs $2 on iOS.

This app takes a single standard snapshot and distorts it into a circular, panoramic-like photo that looks like the output from 360 Panorama. This effect cheats a bit because you are not really snapping panoramic views, but it can be striking. Circular Plus has a clear and minimalist interface that lets you control many image parameters for perfect results, as well as lots of special effect filters.

On Android, the $3 app Tiny Planet FX Pro is akin to Circular Plus and has a good interface. A $2 iOS app called Living Planet does the same thing. Though it has slightly fewer image-tweaking options, it can also turn videos into simulated spherical panoramas for eye-catching results.

Have fun seeing the world in wide angle.

Quick Call

VHS Camcorder is a $4 iOS app that does something counterintuitive: Instead of trying to achieve amazing image quality from your 21st-century smartphone, it deliberately degrades the quality of videos and adds artifacts. The results look eerily similar to videos shot on a 1990s-vintage camcorder. The app’s not perfect, but it could spice up your Instagram videos.