Photo Pills
l £9.99 www.photopills.com
If you were to describe Photo Pills in one sentence, it would have to be The Photographer’s Ephemeris on steroids. This location-planning app is incredibly comprehensive with a wide range of features designed to help you get the very best from any location in the world, at any time of the day or night. Whether you’re shooting a local sunrise or heading to a dark sky area to capture the Milky Way, Photo Pills has everything you need to achieve your shots.
The app offers a planner with maps to see how the sun will rise and set, alongside moon rise and set, phase and supermoon dates. Widgets for both Android and iOS allow you to see instant information about your current location, which is incredibly useful when out on location or scouting. The planner also allows you to save locations for access at a later date, alongside adding images and notes. Plus, you can open a location on Google Maps to find the best route to a location using the directions feature.
This is an essential app for astro and night photographers, thanks to the functionality of the Planner, and also the augmented reality view that allows you to visualise the Milky Way. Other features include a depth- of-field calculator, an exposure calculator for use with ND filters, time-lapse planner, and other features. It certainly feels like the aim of the developers was to create a single app that could do many things outdoor photographers need. But while some elements are easy to use, others, such as Milky Way planning in the Planner, could be simplified.
Photo Pills is an unbelievably feature-packed app with everything you need and much more for planning and shooting outdoors. With so much functionality comes a degree of complexity, and while with The Photographer’s Ephemeris you can simply work your way through the app to find what you need, Photo Pills is less intuitive and requires more time to learn how to use it. There are fortunately extensive tutorials on the Photo Pills website that are essential viewing, and once you understand how it works it really is a fantastic tool.