Getting started
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.
Your first capture
- Tap the floating capture button on the map.
- Frame the shot, tap the shutter. The app records the GPS coordinate, the compass bearing, the EXIF data, and a thumbnail automatically.
- 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.
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.
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 Gallery’s “Uncategorized” rail.
- Open the Maps tab → tap + to create a new map.
- From any spot’s detail screen, tap the map picker to add it to one of your maps (or create a new one inline).
- 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 Gallery 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.
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 and on the free tier. With Pro, it 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.
- 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 — Vantage greets you with “Welcome to $location — watch the weather conditions here?” and a one-tap save, so your trips turn into watch coverage with no effort. The first time, iOS asks for “Always” location permission so it can notice arrivals in the background; decline and the feature simply stays quiet. Your location never leaves the device unless you save the watch, and you can turn it off any time 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.
Free tier and subscription
Viewpoint has a free tier and a Pro subscription.
Free is for capturing and keeping your spots, and it runs entirely on your device — no account, no cost, ever:
- Capture and save spots, with your notes and on-device photos.
- Browse and organise your whole library and collections.
Pro unlocks everything that plans the shot or runs on our servers:
- The sun, moon & Milky Way almanac and the AR celestial scout.
- Live weather & conditions on the map, and condition alerts.
- Cross-device sync and photo backup.
Pricing (shown in your local currency on the paywall):
- Yearly: €59.99 / year — and at launch, a founder first year at a reduced price for the first wave of subscribers. The founder price is for Year 1 only; it then renews at the standard €59.99 / year. Cancel anytime.
- Monthly: €5.99 / month (standard price).
The subscription pays for live weather data, the condition-monitoring backend, photo storage, and continuous development. A lapsed subscription drops you back to the free tier — your existing captures always stay readable on the device, so it never holds your scouting library hostage.
Cancellation is handled by Apple via Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions on your iPhone.
Do I need to sign in?
No. Viewpoint opens straight into the app — you can use the free tier, or subscribe to Pro, with just your Apple ID, and you can capture, browse, and plan without ever creating an account. Everything you make is stored on your device.
Signing in is optional, and it does two things: it syncs your spots, photos, and plans to your other devices, and it turns on condition alerts (push notifications need an account so we know which device to reach). You can sign in any time from Settings — and when you do, anything you captured as a guest comes with you.
Your subscription is separate from signing in — it rides your Apple ID. On a new device, tap Restore Purchases on the paywall to get it back; no account required.
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).
- 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.