Someone is bound to tell me that I simply didn’t look hard enough and that eight plugins already exist to do what I was trying to do. Yet, after installing approximately eight WordPress plugins the other day trying to do what I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish, I could find nothing that worked.

So I did what any reasonable guy with coding experience would do. I wrote and published (well, submitted for review and publication) my own plugin.

So what was the problem I was trying to solve?

My puzzle was around panoramic photos. Do you ever use that feature on your phone camera? You are standing at the edge of some wild vista that just can’t be captured in 4×6 mode and so you use that auto-stitching mode on your camera to pan across the scene and voila: an ultra-wide photo of the whole scene in one panoramic photograph.

I love these things. I started using them as multi-monitor desktop wallpaper on my computer, but then too, I wanted to share them. But the socials all have different ways of coping with photos that just don’t fit nicely on the screen. And if you just drop them in a normal template for regular pics you get either something stretched, cropped, or a pic roughly the vertical height of a postage stamp that is hardly impressive. Others have tried to solve this with crazy JS plugins that create 3D-ish viewers or lightboxes, but I wanted something a bit more subtle and simple.

Now, I’m not saying this is a perfect fit, but about a year ago I found a neat little lightweight CSS way to approach this panorama viewing problem on a little app that I built: I called it the panoramic slider.

It’s not complex: you just display a fixed size box matching the height of your image on a website and then put the image inside the box… but here’s the trick. You don’t stretch or fit it. You just put it in and tell the code to overflow it outside of the box (invisibly) and allow it to scroll horizontally. The user sees part of your picture but then can drag it back and forth to see the rest.

So I finally built an automated way to do this in WordPress via a plugin, and it looks something like this:

Try clicking the (autohiding) arrows or sliding it with your finger (on a mobile device).

I was just going to keep it to myself, but after spending a few hours with the code, allowing AI to check it for obvious errors, tweaking the styling, and making a pretty respectable version one, I submitted it for review and publication in the WordPress library. If all goes well, you can download it for yourself in a few days… and start taking and posting more panoramic pictures.

You can check it out more fully on my plugins page.