Every landscape photographer ends up with a folder of apps they actually open before a shoot, and a much bigger folder of ones they downloaded once and forgot about. After a decade of shooting and a few years of building one of these tools myself, here is the short list - the apps I genuinely reach for when a window of good light is approaching and I have to make a call on where to be and when to leave.
This is opinionated. It is also written by someone who builds Inverza, so take the placement of #2 with a grain of salt - or don't, since I will explain exactly what each app does well and where it stops.
#1PhotoPills
- Best for
- Geometry. Where the sun, moon, or Milky Way will be at a precise time, from a precise spot.
- Strength
- Augmented-reality planner, accurate ephemeris, time-lapse and exposure calculators.
- Weakness
- Tells you nothing about whether the sky will actually cooperate.
- Price
- One-time purchase.
PhotoPills earns the top slot because no other tool does what it does. Point your phone at a peak, dial the date forward to October, and see the moon rise exactly there. Nothing else gets the geometry that right, that intuitively. If you are planning a moon-over-monument shot or a Milky Way alignment six months out, this is the app you open.
The reason it is not the only app you need is that PhotoPills assumes you already know the weather will hold. It can tell you the sun will set behind that ridge at 19:42, but it can't tell you whether the sky will be a featureless grey lid or the kind of mid-cloud canvas that lights up neon for ninety seconds after sunset. That is a different problem.
#2Inverza
- Best for
- Conditions. Will the sky do something worth photographing - and when, exactly.
- Strength
- Detects 16 photogenic phenomena automatically (colourful dawns, fog, alpenglow, fogbows, Brocken spectres, Milky Way, aurora, more), with terrain-aware sun and moon timing and an AI that can answer "is tomorrow worth it?" in plain language.
- Weakness
- Younger app, smaller community than PhotoPills - no AR planner, by design.
- Price
- Free with optional subscription.
I built this one because the question I kept asking on every trip - "is the light going to be any good?" - had no good answer. PhotoPills can place the sun. Weather apps can give you cloud cover. But neither of them tells you whether the cloud cover that's coming is the right kind of cloud cover - high cirrus that catches afterglow versus mid-altostratus that just goes flat grey - or whether the ridge to your west will block the last 0.4 degrees of the sun before it can hit anything.
Inverza runs that physics for you. It cross-checks high, mid, and low cloud cover, humidity, dew point, atmospheric clarity, terrain obstruction down to a 1° resolution, sun and moon altitude, and a few dozen other variables. Then it surfaces specific named conditions - "Colourful Dawn at 05:18", "Brocken Spectre window 06:40-07:10", "Sea Fog rolling in at 04:00" - with a confidence score and a plain-English reason. The AI chat lets you ask follow-ups in your own words: "should I drive 90 minutes to the coast tomorrow morning?" gets a real answer, with the relevant numbers cited.
Use PhotoPills to know where the sun will be. Use Inverza to know whether it will be worth photographing.
#3Windy
- Best for
- Visualising weather systems. Animated wind, cloud, precipitation, and humidity layers across multiple forecast models.
- Strength
- Beautiful map UI, easy to switch between ECMWF, GFS, and ICON to see model disagreement, great for spotting fronts and inversions.
- Weakness
- Raw meteorological data, not photographer data. You have to interpret it yourself.
- Price
- Free with optional Premium tier.
Windy is what you open when something interesting is brewing and you want to see it. A cold front pushing into the Alps, a line of low cloud setting up off the coast, a temperature inversion that's about to fill the valleys with fog. The animated layers make weather legible in a way no number-and-icon forecast does.
The reason it doesn't sit higher is that Windy is a meteorologist's tool, not a photographer's. It will happily show you 60% mid-cloud cover at a location, but it won't tell you that 60% mid-cloud at sunset is exactly the canvas you want for an afterglow, and 60% mid-cloud at noon usually means a flat day. That translation work is on you. If you enjoy doing it - and many photographers genuinely do - Windy is brilliant. If you'd rather skip the interpretation step, that's where a tool like Inverza comes in.
#4Viewfindr
- Best for
- Spot scouting in mountainous regions. Curated photogenic locations with weather scoring layered on top.
- Strength
- Detects weather conditions with its own algorithms, displays results on a map, useful library of pre-vetted compositions.
- Weakness
- No AI, no plain-language summary. Getting useful results still requires manual planning and a fair bit of digging through the UI - not unlike using Windy if you're willing to do the interpretation yourself.
- Price
- Free with optional subscription.
Viewfindr deserves a slot because it tackles a real problem - finding good compositions in unfamiliar terrain - and because it does run weather detection of its own. Where it stops short is the bridge between "the data is in there somewhere" and "here's what I should do tomorrow morning". Without an AI layer, you end up tapping through screens and cross-referencing forecasts manually, which is essentially the same workflow a Windy user opts into. If you genuinely enjoy the manual planning process, Viewfindr is a strong pick. If you want a one-question answer, you'll find yourself wanting more.
#5Apple Weather
- Best for
- The 90-second sanity check. Glance, decide, move on.
- Strength
- Already on your phone, accurate enough for "do I bring the rain shell", lock-screen widgets, integrates with the rest of the OS.
- Weakness
- Generic forecast designed for the general public. No notion of cloud altitude, terrain, or photogenic conditions.
- Price
- Free, built in.
I almost left this off, then realised I open it five times a day. Apple Weather is genuinely good now - the post-Dark-Sky integration cleaned up most of the rough edges, the precipitation animation is reliable, and the widgets mean you can check a forecast without unlocking the phone. As a baseline awareness tool it does its job.
The catch is that "65% cloud cover" tells you nothing about whether that cloud is at 1,000 m or 8,000 m, whether it's a closed lid or scattered, whether it's east of you or west of you, or whether the bit covering the sun at sunset is the same bit covering you at the camera. Photographers need that decomposition. The general public does not. Apple Weather is built for the general public, and that is fine.
Honourable mention: Sun Surveyor
If PhotoPills feels like overkill for what you actually plan, Sun Surveyor is the lighter, prettier alternative. The 3D compass view is genuinely beautiful, the AR mode is responsive, and for someone who only needs sun and moon position - not the full Milky Way + ND calculator + time-lapse-tracker firehose - it's the calmer choice. It doesn't go as deep, but it doesn't need to.
How to actually use this list
Don't install all five and call it done. Here's the workflow I'd suggest:
- Inverza on the home screen. Glance, see if any of the next 72 hours light up green, and let it tell you the named condition and the time window.
- PhotoPills when something is on the calendar. Once Inverza has flagged a window, use PhotoPills to nail the specific composition - where exactly the sun will set behind the church, what time the moon clears the ridge.
- Windy when something feels off. If Inverza says the conditions look promising but your gut disagrees, switch to Windy and look at the model layers. It's also where you go to confirm an inversion is really setting up.
- Viewfindr when you're somewhere new. Unfamiliar valley, unfamiliar coast - browse the curated spots, then run the timing through Inverza and PhotoPills.
- Apple Weather as a tap reflex. The 90-second "is it raining now?" check that nothing else replaces.
The job of these tools is to remove guesswork without removing your eye. The photographer is still the one who has to decide what's worth getting up at 04:00 for. The right apps just make sure you don't waste the 04:00.
