Photographer's Ephemeris 3D

Sept 2025 Update: Since the latest update, I’ve found navigation to be even more glitchy than before. Scrolling around the map in a given area, with a single finger, causes unexpected movements. This makes it difficult to use, teach, or recommend to students and colleagues. ————————- I’ve used this app for planning and teaching night photography since it came out. It helps visualize the scene in terms of alignment of stars and large landscape features, but there are major drawbacks which make this app frustrating to use: 1. No satellite imagery. Regardless of the ‘complexity settings,’ there is no access satellite imagery. This is not only a disappointment, but unrealistic for a navigational/planning app. You can access satellite imagery with TPE, but not TPE-3D. This is a dealbreaker. 2. Navigating is impossible. The app is limited to a ‘zoom-out level’ that does not allow you to scroll to areas far apart. For example, in the original TPE, you can zoom out as far as you want to scroll to different states if need be for quick and easy browsing. This app won’t allow that. The only saving grace, which is by no means a real solution, is to go back to the regular TPE, pin the location, then export to TPE-3D. 3. Your ‘current location’ is not clear. Select ‘my location’ and the app flys to a general vicinity, but there is nothing to represent where you are located. When you pair this with the illegible background map, it’s impossible to know where you are located. 4. Moonlight across the landscape is too dark to notice a difference. Sunrise or sunset light within the app is legible, but I would like to see moonlight represented much brighter. If you’re planning a shot with moonlight and you look at this app outside during the day, it’s impossible to see the change in moonlight across the landscape. With these current design issues, most of my clients try the app once, then never open it again. This app has a lot of potential, but I still prefer using Google Earth’s landscape desktop feature.

This app used to be 5 stars. Now I can’t get it to work. So frustrating. The 3D map loads and then nothing just says locating with the spinning icon and NEVER LOADS. I have a brand new iPad Pro with latest updates and still won’t work. Grrrrrrrrrrr

My results look nothing like the images in the App Store. Moving from sunrise to noon in the location I selected, an oceanfront bluff, you get a slight sense of shadow on the sand and then the light overall just comes up. In real light, there is absolute shadow on the sand until the sun gets up high enough to light it. Can I get a refund? Thank you

I was hoping this app would help me predict light and shadows on a given day and at a given time. To some extent, it does. But not the level of details that I need. A bit disappointed.

On an iPad Pro 9.7, the map detail, even in enhanced mode, is too poor to use for any precision location planning.

The app works great for visualization of how the light will fall. Honestly it’s only competitor is Google Earth Pro (desktop only) and this does a better job than that. The controls take a bit getting used to, and I still slide around sometimes, but it’s workable. The *only* reason this doesn’t get 5 stars is the amount of juice this app uses- on my iPhone 7 Plus it absolutely cranks and destroys the battery life; I pretty much can only use it plugged in if I don’t want to lose obscene percentages of battery quickly. However, newer phones may handle this better, I’m not able to test that unfortunately. Even with this issue I still love this app.

Disappointing that TPE 3D uses a topo rather than a satellite map. Side streets are not named and are only marginally shown. Scaling of pin size doesn’t seem to exist. As you zoom in the pin becomes enormous blocking part of view. Using on iPad Pro.

Great app for framing landscape shots and planning for light. Was very helpful on my Iceland trip. I’m unaware of another app that does this. On my iPad Pro, the two search buttons at bottom right bring up a grey screen that I can’t exit out of. I have to force close the app. This makes it so I can’t jump from Iceland back to the sites in the US that I’m shooting. The app is basically broken for me right now. NEW UPDATE: Its not network io. It’s screen orientation. When in portrait mode, the search pane is rendered off the screen. To see it, switch to landscape mode. UPDATE: I waited about five minutes and the saved places screen finally came up. What I may be seeing is the app waiting for data that never comes. When I tap those buttons now, the saved places screen comes up fast now. Suggest adding a spinner or a way to cancel the sync. UPDATE: I was able to verify the developer’s response. Things look good now. Been using the app a lot lately, (helped out a bunch on a trip last weekend to plan a Milky Way shoot). I’m very happy with the app. Thank you for the bug fixes!

Like being there

Locations are difficult. I have to start at the city level and manually find the location. Seems like an address should be sufficient. Would love to see improvement on this