Best Apps and Tools for Outdoor Photographers

Most outdoor photographers eventually accumulate a folder of single-purpose apps. Sun position, cloud cover, tide tables, light pollution maps, the lot. Most of them are mediocre. A few are excellent. Here is the working list I would tell a friend starting out.

Sun position and timing

The fundamental layer. Everything else depends on knowing where the sun is and when.

• Sunhour. The reason this post exists. It gives a clean timeline strip showing civil/nautical/astronomical twilight bands, golden hour, blue hour, and the moon track on one screen. The strength is the visual: at a glance you can see whether the night is dark enough for stars, how long magic hour will last, when blue hour really starts. Free to use, fast.
• PhotoPills. The heavyweight option. Augmented-reality view of where the sun and moon will be at a given time, planner mode for catching specific alignments (sun behind a mountain, moon rising next to a building). Steep learning curve, more features than you will use in the first year. Worth the paid price if you do a lot of pre-planned alignment work.
• The Photographer's Ephemeris. Older, map-based. Good for desk planning. Less polished than PhotoPills but the desktop web version is free and useful for trip planning.

Weather and cloud

The killer of outdoor shoots. Two apps cover the spectrum.

• Windy.com. Layered weather with separate cloud-cover bands by altitude. The reason this matters: low cloud is bad for landscape, high cloud is what gives a dramatic sunset. Most weather apps lump these into one. Windy keeps them separate.
• Clear Outside. Hour-by-hour cloud cover percentage, made for astronomers but useful for any night shoot. The same kind of data as Windy but with a less polished interface that wastes less of your time. NOAA also publishes their own forecast data if you want a deeper source.

Dark sky and light pollution

• Light Pollution Map (lightpollutionmap.info). Free, comprehensive, colour-coded Bortle scale overlay on the world map. Use this to find a dark-sky site before you drive. It has saved me at least one wasted trip.
• Stellarium Mobile. Star and constellation positions for any place and time. Useful for finding where the Milky Way will be at, say, 23:00 from Reykjavik on a specific date. The free version is enough for most planning.

Tide tables (for coastal work)

If you are anywhere near the sea, tides matter as much as light. Wet sand reflecting golden-hour light is the killer landscape shot, but only at the right tidal phase.

• Tides Near Me / Tide Charts. Both decent. Pick the one with better local coverage for where you live.
• For UK coasts: the official Admiralty Tide Tables data is in most apps; do not pay for what is government data.

Compass, level, and a calculator

The boring trio.

• The built-in compass on a phone is usually fine for working out the sun's azimuth direction. If it is wandering, the magnetometer needs recalibrating — figure-eight motion fixes it.
• A built-in level (or a small bubble level on the hotshoe) gets the horizon straight.
• Any focal-length-to-angle-of-view calculator. Useful for figuring out whether a 50mm shot from a certain distance will fit a landmark, before you drive there.

Maps with topography

Google Maps in satellite mode is decent for scouting, but it does not show terrain well.

• Gaia GPS / Caltopo. Topographic overlays, public access boundaries, contour lines. Worth it if you do any back-country work.
• Google Earth. Free, web-based, shows elevation profile of any line. Useful for working out whether a peak will block your view from a certain spot.

The home-screen ruthless principle

The honest test for any photography app: did you open it in the last month? If not, archive it. I rotate apps off my home screen every quarter — anything that did not get used in the last quarter goes to the second page, anything in the second page for two quarters gets deleted. Most photographers carry too many apps and consult none of them properly.

What you do not need

You do not need a dedicated app for every variable. Sunhour handles sun and moon. A weather app handles weather. A maps app handles location. A notes app holds the trip plan. Four things on the home screen, in roughly that order. Everything else is a luxury that probably will not get used the morning you need to leave the house at 04:30 in the cold.