According to some code strings posted by 9to5mac and found in the first beta version of iOS 5, Apple may soon introduce a panoramic camera functionality to go alongside the photo editing enhancements announced at the WWDC keynote. As detailed by Scott Forstall on stage, iOS 5 will bring the possibility to crop, rotate and auto-enhance images from the native Photos app – these features won’t be available on the iPhone 3GS, but they represent a great addition for iPhone 4 users that won’t need to purchase additional basic photo-editing apps anymore. With red-eye reduction and Photo Stream compatibility, Apple touts the new Photos app as the best way to take photos on an iPhone, and send them to an iPad for a quick touch-up. However, as the code discovered suggests, there may be more coming in future betas.

There’s a variety of “pano” photo apps available in the App Store, some of them like Occipital’s 360 Panorama and Pano we reviewed on MacStories before. These apps allow you to take photos of what’s around you to build a panoramic, zoomable representation that “stitches” the various images you’ve taken together in a single file.

The code found in iOS 5 beta doesn’t suggest much, except that Apple has been thinking about a menu to “take” and “save” a panorama. These strings are usually a good indication of new features to come in iOS 5 – in January, iOS 4.3 beta code confirmed that Photo Booth camera effects would be implemented sooner or later, and indeed the iPad 2 (released in March) sported a native Photo Booth app on its custom 4.3 version.