A few years ago somebody had already suggested implementing panorama viewing in IrfanView.The answer was that there are already panorama viewers available. After having tried a few of them I suggest to implement a limited panorama viewing capability in IrfanView. Continuous viewing (without left and right edge) of cylindrical 360° panoramas with a small vertical viewing angle like that from the top of a mountain should be made possible. This enhancement could be simply implemented by not stopping the horizontal scrolling of an image filling the height of the window at the left and the right edge but continuing with the image content at the other edge so that the user can perform an arbitrary number of full turns as he can on the top of a mountain. But why do I suggest this for IrfanView if there are full featured viewers available? One reason is that most of them cannot display simple images so that one would have to change the program for viewing a mixed series of images with many simple images and a few panoramas. However, the main reason is, that these viewers miss some capabilities of IrfanView like color management and display of metadata within the image. Switching to the panorama mode could be done manually but an automatic solution should also not be difficult. I believe that viewing of cylindrical panoramas is much more important for most users than viewing spherical panoramas because it is easy (with special programs like Hugin) to compose a panorama of this kind from a series of overlapping images taken by any simple hand held camera while creating a spherical panorama normally needs special (and often heavy) equipment.
