Getting started with Viewpoint

What Viewpoint is

Viewpoint is a scouting and planning tool for photographers — any genre, any location. You capture the places you shoot (with their location, light, conditions, and your own notes), plan when to go back, and get push notifications when the conditions you care about line up. Landscape, night, street, wedding — anywhere worth photographing.

It is offline-first: capture, browse, and plan work with no signal. See Offline behaviour.

And it does something genuinely new: with Find your viewpoint, you name the shot you want — the moon behind a cathedral, the sun behind a ridge — and Viewpoint’s AI finds the real places you could stand to line it up, and the exact time each one happens. It’s scouting run backwards. See how it works →

Which devices it runs on

Viewpoint runs on your iPhone (from the App Store) and in your web browser at web.getviewpoint.app — the same all-in-one planning platform on either screen. You can plan and shoot from both: the phone goes everywhere and works fully offline; the web app gives you a big screen, a pointer and room for the deeper planning. Your maps, notes and plans sync between them automatically, so a plan made on one is already on the other. There is an Android app too, on Google Play. It is an early version and does not yet do everything the iPhone app does — the FAQ lists what is still missing — so on an Android phone the web app is still the fuller experience for the deeper planning. These guides describe the iPhone app. The web app works the same way for most of what’s here, but not for all of it: capturing a new spot through the camera, the AR Celestial Scout, the live light meter, widgets, spot & map sharing and Look Around opened from a spot stay on the phone, the sun · moon · Milky Way almanac has no screen of its own on the web yet, and the web app needs a connection. The web app is part of the Online plan — see Use Viewpoint on the web below, and Viewpoint on the web for what runs where.

Telling us what you shoot

The first time you open Viewpoint, it asks what you love to photograph — Milky Way and stars, the moon, golden and blue hour, fog, seascapes, wildlife, cityscapes, or storms. Pick any that fit, or tap Skip. It’s a one-time question that helps tailor the app to you.

If you pick something Viewpoint can forecast — clear nights, golden light, fog, snow, or dramatic storm light — it offers to keep an eye on your area and let you know when those conditions line up. That’s entirely optional: nothing is turned on unless you tap Turn on alerts, and you can add, change, or remove watches anytime from the Watches screen. Condition alerts need an account and a Viewpoint plan that includes them. For dramatic storm light there’s also a Storm Light — Upcoming list (in Tools) that ranks the next few days’ sunrise and sunset windows by how likely the sky is to turn dramatic, and shows the cloud, CAPE and gust numbers each verdict came from — Storm Light is a read on potential, not a promise. It’s on iPhone today — tap a window to see it on the map — and it’s coming to Android in a future update.

Your first capture

1. Tap the floating capture button on the map.
2. Frame the shot, tap the shutter. The app records the GPS coordinate, the compass bearing, the EXIF data, and a thumbnail automatically.
3. The post-capture detail sheet opens. Optionally add a name, notes, and a map — or just tap Save and come back to it later.

A capture is saved locally the instant you tap Save — you never lose one for being out of signal. If you’ve signed in, it also syncs to your other devices the next time you’re online; as a guest it simply stays safely on your device.

If your phone only knows roughly where you are, Viewpoint says so. A phone can answer a location prompt with a rough area — as much as a few square kilometres — instead of a point. Viewpoint will still let you capture, and it records how precise the reading actually was, so it never draws a spot as an exact place when it was not one.

On the iPhone app: if you have turned Precise Location off for Viewpoint, it tells you and offers to switch it back on for the shot. Opening a spot that was saved that way shows it as approximate, with a circle on its mini-map covering the area the reading actually describes.

On the iPhone app this travels with a spot you did not capture. Open somebody else’s public spot and, if their phone only knew roughly where they were, you see the same note and the same circle before you drive out to it — the one place a rough pin is easiest to trust, because you have never stood there. Save that spot to your own library and the reading comes with it, so your copy does not quietly become an exact place. Browsing other photographers’ public spots is an iPhone feature today.

The Android app does the same, including Android’s Approximate answer to the location prompt and a one-tap switch to precise location while you are shooting.

Honest limits. In the iPhone app this marking is on the spot’s own screen — the Map tab, the widgets, Look Around and the AR picker still draw every pin the same way, so open the spot itself when the precision matters. The web app does not show it yet either. And a spot with no accuracy reading at all — anything captured before this existed, and anything you drop on the map by hand — is shown exactly as it always was, because a warning on every spot you have ever saved would be worse than none.

Got the wrong spot? Open a spot’s detail screen, tap the mini-map, then Move pin. Pan the map to fine-tune, or tap Search for a place to type a place name, address, or coordinate and jump straight there — handy when you add a photo that has no GPS data and it lands on your current location instead of where it was shot.

Know the place by name? On the Explore map, tap the search bar and type an address or place name. Pick a result, nudge the pin to the exact spot, name it, and save — a fast way to add a location you know before you’re standing on it, or to plan from your desk. Place search needs a connection; with no signal the same bar offers to drop a pin on the map instead, so you’re never stuck.

Organising with maps

Spots can be grouped into maps — a coastal sunrise list, a winter trip, a city walk, a wedding-venue scouting set. Spots not yet in a map show in the Locations tab’s grid, under the “Uncategorized” rail.

1. Open the Maps tab → tap + to create a new map.
2. From any spot’s detail screen, tap the map picker to add it to one of your maps (or create a new one inline).
3. Long-press members within a map to drag-reorder them — the order matters for the cover-image fallback and the page-by-page spot detail flow.

Finding a spot again

Tap the magnifying glass in the Locations header and describe the spot the way you’d remember it — “foggy forest”, “coast at sunset”, “that rocky viewpoint from last autumn”. Results rank across your spot names and notes, the place label, the time of year you captured it, and what your photos actually show — Viewpoint recognises scenes (coast, forest, mountains, city, and more) in your own images.

This all happens on your device. Your photos are never uploaded for this, and what you type is never sent anywhere or logged — see Data & transparency. On devices with Apple Intelligence, search understands more conversational phrasing; on others it falls back to a plain keyword match over the same fields.

Seeing a place before you go

When you add a spot from the desk — a place you’ve read about but haven’t visited — it has no photos yet, so its frame sits empty. Viewpoint fills that frame where it can, so you get a feel for the place before you travel.

It draws on two different kinds of imagery, and they answer slightly different questions:

• A photograph of the place itself, taken by a photographer and published under an open licence. This is the better answer when it exists, because it shows the landscape rather than the nearest road — and because we’re allowed to keep a copy, it can appear anywhere the spot does, including your Locations and Maps cards.
• A street-level view from near the pin, where no such photograph exists. Captured from the road, so it may show the approach rather than the view, but it covers far more of the world. On iPhone, tap See this place on the spot.

Four things to know:

• It isn’t your photo, and it never becomes one. It’s someone else’s work, shown for context and credited to them. It isn’t saved to your library, doesn’t sync, and never becomes the spot’s cover photo. As soon as you add a photo of your own, yours is what you see.
• The credit stays with the picture. An openly licensed photograph is shown with its photographer and its licence, and a link to where it came from. If we can’t credit it properly, we don’t show it at all.
• It isn’t everywhere, and it needs a connection. Named landmarks and well-photographed places do well; a remote coastline, deep forest or an unnamed layby often has nothing from either source, and those spots simply keep the empty frame. So does everything when you’re offline.
• It can change, or go away. We keep getting better at picking the right picture for a place, and we go back over the ones we already chose: a spot may quietly gain a better photograph, or lose one that turned out to be of somewhere too broad to be useful — a whole region rather than your viewpoint — and return to the empty frame. A photograph also disappears if its photographer withdraws it or changes its licence, which we re-check periodically. None of this touches your own photos.

A photograph is sometimes of a nearby feature rather than the exact pin — the mountain your viewpoint sits on, say, rather than the viewpoint itself. When that happens, Viewpoint names what you’re looking at, so you’re never left assuming a picture is of somewhere it isn’t.

Planning a shoot

The Map and the planning tools show sun and moon direction, and cloud-cover forecasts, for a spot and a date. These are forecasts — read Data & transparency for what they can and cannot tell you.

For each spot you can:

• See the best time to photograph — a card on the spot’s detail screen that reads out the day’s golden-hour window, tonight’s dark-sky window for the stars (until the moon rises), and the spot’s best season. It’s computed on your device from the spot’s location, so it works offline on either plan. The Online plan also shows today’s live outlook — how likely golden light and a clear night actually are, from the forecast; tap a row to open it on the map.
• View the sun + moon trajectory for any date.
• Pick a date and see the forecast cloud-cover layers (high / mid / low) on the map for that day.
• Add a composition guide — a reusable note for what to shoot here and why: a title, the framing notes, an optional celestial subject (sun, moon, or the Milky Way) and how it relates to the scene, an optional focal-length and orientation hint, and a reference photo — chosen from the spot’s own gallery or imported from your photo library. A guide is time-free — it describes the shot, not a single date — so a spot can hold several, and a shoot plan can build on top of one.
• Save a shoot plan — a saved (date, camera, subject) tuple that fixes the framing you want, with the light + alignment math computed for you. Set the focal length and your camera type (full frame, APS-C, Micro 4/3, medium format) and the on-map framing guide shows the true angle of view your lens will capture — a crop-sensor body reads tighter than full frame at the same focal length. Pick a default camera type once in Settings → Camera; any plan can override it for a different body.
• Set a watch — a notification subscription that pings you when the chosen condition (clear night, golden light, fog, etc.) is in the forecast for the area you’ve watched.

When you arrive somewhere new — a different region or country, far from the areas you already watch — Viewpoint offers to start watching the conditions there, with a one-tap save, so your trips turn into watch coverage with no effort. When the offer reaches you differs by phone, and it is worth knowing which one you have:

• On iPhone it finds you. Viewpoint notices the arrival in the background and greets you with “Welcome to $location — watch the weather conditions here?”. The first time, iOS asks for “Always” location permission so it can do that; decline and the feature simply stays quiet.
• On Android, it waits for you instead. The offer appears the next time you open the app while you are in the new area — not at the airport, and not while the app is closed. Viewpoint will only ever check your location while you have it open; it will not follow you in the background, and it will ask for no background-location permission at all.

Either way your location never leaves the device unless you save the watch, nothing about where you have been is kept beyond the single most recent prompt, and you can turn the whole thing off under Settings → Travel.

How busy a spot gets

On a spot’s detail screen you can tag how busy it was when you shot there — empty, a few people, or crowded. As you tag more of your visits, the Crowds card builds a picture of how the spot tends to be: an overall “usually a few people” read, plus a breakdown by weekday vs weekend and time of day, so you can tell a quiet weekday sunrise from a packed weekend afternoon.

This is your own record of what you saw — it’s computed on your device from the photos you’ve tagged, never crowd-sourced or pulled from a third party, and it’s only ever shown to you. See Data & transparency.

Sharing with others

Invite someone by email to a single spot or a whole map — as a viewer (they can see it) or an editor (they can change it). They accept right in the app, and either side can make their own copy to build on independently. See Sharing spots & maps.

On your Home Screen

Add widgets to your Home and Lock Screen for tonight’s sun and light times, the Milky Way window, your next shoot plan, recent spots, and a conditions score — all at a glance, no need to open the app. See Widgets.

Use Viewpoint on the web

Viewpoint isn’t just a phone app — the same all-in-one planning platform runs in your browser at web.getviewpoint.app. Open it on any computer and your whole library, maps and plans are right there on the big screen. The planning side of the work is all there, with the comfort of a large display: review a region, drop pins, read your notes and reference photos, and plan compositions with a real pointer and a large map. It’s the natural place for the deeper planning — and the phone has it all too, fully offline, wherever you are.

Most of the phone is there. Your Locations, Maps (spot collections), Spot detail, the map (drop pins, add notes and photos), shoot planning with the camera/subject geometry — sun and moon figures included — your Plans (every shoot you’ve planned — upcoming and past, filtered by sun, moon or Milky Way), your Watches (the spots and regions you’re tracking for clear nights, golden light, fog, snow and storm light — create and edit them on the map, and read the condition events each one has produced), the Studio tools and the field calculators are all there. Do it on one device, see it everywhere — everything syncs. What stays on the iPhone: capturing a spot through the camera, the AR Celestial Scout, the live light meter, Home- and Lock-Screen widgets, spot & map sharing, Look Around opened from a spot, the sun · moon · Milky Way almanac as a screen of its own — and working with no signal at all. See Viewpoint on the web for the full iPhone-vs-web breakdown.

Stay in the loop. A notification bell sits in the top-right of every screen, with an unread badge. Open it for an at-a-glance inbox: the condition alerts from the regions and spots you watch (clear nights, golden light, fog, snow, storm light — newest first), shoot-plan reminders (a nudge 24 hours and 1 hour before a shoot you’ve planned, so the planned shot doesn’t slip your mind), alongside the occasional Viewpoint release note so you hear about new features as they land. Tap a golden-light alert to open it on the map — a warm overlay shows where the golden light is strongest across the area, so you can read the light at a glance before you head out; tap a shoot-plan reminder to open the plan. You can also turn on desktop alerts — flip Desktop alerts on in Settings → Notifications (or tap Enable on the prompt in the bell) and your browser will notify you when a watched condition hits, when a shoot you’ve planned is coming up, or when a new Viewpoint release note is published — even with no Viewpoint tab open. It’s entirely opt-in; we never ask until you turn it on, and you can switch it off the same way.

Signing in. The web app is part of the Online plan, so it asks you to sign in (with Apple or Google) and checks your subscription. It’s the same account you use on the phone, so everything you’ve captured is already waiting for you.

Tip: Want to try the photography maths without signing in? The field calculators run free in your browser — no account, no install.

Plans

Viewpoint is a subscription with a free trial — there’s no ad-supported or feature-limited free tier. There are two plans:

Offline is the full scouting + planning toolkit, running entirely on your device with no account needed:

• Capture a spot in seconds — auto-stamped with GPS and the sun & light for that place and moment. Add notes, on-device photos, and save the directions so you can find your way back.
• Your Locations — every spot you’ve saved, viewed as a grid or on the map with a single Grid / Map toggle, and organised into Maps, your own curated collections.
• Scout on the map with Look Around street-level imagery, before you ever leave home.
• Shoot planning — frame the shot with the camera/subject geometry and the relative-light readout.
• The Sun · Moon · Milky Way almanac, the AR celestial scout (the sun, moon and Milky Way drawn over your live camera), and the alignment planner (when the sun or moon lines up with your subject).
• The photography calculators — depth of field, hyperfocal, ND.

Online adds the connected layer that runs on our servers:

• Live weather & conditions on the Locations map, and condition alerts (clear night, fog, golden light).
• Cross-device sync and photo backup on our servers, plus spot & map sharing. (On the Offline plan, iPhone and iPad still sync your spots and photos across your devices through your own iCloud; sharing is the Online-only piece.)
• Viewpoint on the web — your library, maps and planning on the big screen at web.getviewpoint.app. See Use Viewpoint on the web.

Compare the plans

Both plans start with a free trial — 3 days on Offline, 7 days on Online — and come as monthly or yearly (yearly is cheaper per month):

	Monthly	Yearly
Offline	$1.99	$8.99
Online	$3.99	$34.99

These are US prices. Viewpoint is available worldwide and pricing varies by country — your local price is always shown on the in-app paywall and in your app store before you’re charged. Cancel anytime.

The subscription pays for live weather data, the condition-monitoring backend, photo storage, and continuous development. If your subscription lapses you’ll need to resubscribe to keep using the app — but your captures are never deleted from your device.

Subscriptions are managed by the store you bought from — Apple or Google, not us. We can’t cancel one on your behalf, and the steps change whenever a store redesigns its menus, so here are the stores’ own instructions:

• Cancel a subscription from Apple
• Cancel a subscription on Google Play

Cancelling takes effect at the end of the current billing period — you keep your plan until then.

Do I need to sign in?

It depends on your plan.

On the Offline plan — no. There’s no Viewpoint account at all. You capture, browse, and plan as a guest, and everything you make is stored on your device. On iPhone and iPad, signing in to the same Apple ID on another device syncs your library privately through your own iCloud — still no Viewpoint account involved.

On the Online plan — yes, signing in is required. The Online plan is the account-tied connected layer — cross-device sync, live weather and condition alerts, photo backup, and spot & map sharing — and all of it needs to know it’s you, so there’s no guest mode for it. You sign in when you start the plan, and anything you captured earlier as a guest comes with you. On iPhone and iPad that’s Sign in with Apple or Google; on Android it’s Google (Sign in with Apple isn’t available there).

The Android sign-in screen also shows an email and password box. That’s for accounts we set up by hand — app-store reviewers and the occasional support case — so there’s no way to create one yourself, and no password to reset. Use Google.

Your subscription itself rides your store account — your Apple ID, or the Google account you use on Google Play — separate from the Viewpoint sign-in. On a new device, tap Restore Purchases on the paywall to get your plan back. The two stores are separate purchases: a subscription bought on one doesn’t carry over to the other.

Where to go from here

• Offline behaviour — what works without a signal.
• Data & transparency — how forecasts work, and what they can’t tell you.
• Photo storage — per-spot limits, compression.
• Account limits — what’s capped and what isn’t (almost everything you create is uncapped).
• Sharing spots & maps — invite someone to a spot or map as a viewer or editor.
• Widgets — Home and Lock Screen widgets for light, plans, and conditions.
• FAQ — quick answers to common questions, including AR overlay accuracy.
• How analytics work — what’s collected if you opt in, what’s never collected, where it goes.
• Privacy policy — the full data- handling overview.