What’s app? – Android apps for serious photographers

During my tours and workshops I often get questions what photography related apps I use the most and why. So I decided to make a list of the apps and make a short informative article about it. Since I own an Android smartphone (Samsung Galaxy s3), this is a list of Android apps:

Click on the icons to go to Google Play store.

ProCapture – camera + panorama

My main camera app. ProCapture adds more advanced features to your Android camera than the regular camera app that comes along with operating system. The one I like the most is manual focus mode. You can just tap on the area of the frame where you want the focus to be and the camera app will focus there. Very handy and effective. More of the cool features are panorama shooting mode, live histogram and composition grids among many… Price: €0,89

Sun Surveyor (Sun & Moon)

Sun Surveyor is one of the coolest photography apps ever! So easy to use and so effective. All you have to do is to turn on your GPS and point your phone towards your shooting direction. Sun Surveyor  gives you a visual and precise position of Sun and Moon and their paths over the sky. You can even set different dates to check where the sun will be travelling on selected day. Besides this cool visual picture this app also offers many features for planning your landscape shoot. The only downside is the price… Price: €5,35

Sundroid Pro

Sundroid was my first app which helped me calculate sunrises/sunsets and moon phases. Even though some other apps (like Sun Surveyor or TPE) have some more advanced features for detailed planning I still use Sundroid a lot. One of the reasons is the ease of use – most of relevant information is quickly accessible and the second reason is ALARMS. You can set alarms that will notify you of an upcoming event such as full moon, sunrise or other celestial events. Price: €2,39

The photographer’s ephemeris (TPE)

Probably the best app out there for landscape photography planning. TPE It lets you plan your shoot in details, it has all features of the above two apps and a lot more. The most useful is the graphical display on a map where you can use two pins to determine how the sun/moon is positioned relative to your location and the subject. Fantastic. It does require a little bit of studying all the features but it pays big time. You can even calculate when the sun will appear from behind a mountain! TPE also has a desktop app, free of charge and is very useful to plan the soot before you leave your home. Watch this video tutorial.  Price: €3,74

Photo tools

As a name suggests this apps is a bundle of different photography tools all gathered in one place. I use it mostly for calculating exact Depth of Field, but also use other features occasionally. It is quite helpful to me as a photography instructor when working with clients and explaining about composition (it has nice grid overlay), colours (colour wheel), white balance, depth of field and so on. Price: Free (but you can donate €1,99 via plugin)

zFolio (SmugFolio, PicFolio,…)

Very fast and reliable gallery for different online photo sharing and archiving services such as Zenfolio, Smugmug, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Dropbox and more. Just sign in with your username (I use Zenfolio) and sync your online galleries with your phone! Very useful for showing your portfolio to your clients or friends. Price: €1,99

Snapseed

Smart phone photo editor developed by Nik software (recently acquired by Google). Most of the serious photographers know Nik software and their plugins for Photoshop (and other) and will quickly be familiar with Snapseed features. This app lets you edit the photos you took with your phone quickly and easily before you share them with your friends.  Price: Free

Posing app

Excellent assistant for portrait photographers. This app contains a huge selection of different poses and is all categorised into sections like men, women, couples, wedding, glamour… The poses come in sketches with short tips hot to take better portraits. Very helpful when you run out of ideas or when you want to explain your model what you have in mind for a next pose. Price: €2,49

Dropbox

Not really a photography app but it has some great features that are useful for photographers. The best one by far is automatic upload of your photos to the Dropbox folder. When you take the photo with your Android phone it will automatically be uploaded and synchronized with every computer where you have a Dropbox installed. Great for sharing photos and for a backup. Price: Free

GPS essentials

This is one of the best, feature full app for GPS tools on the market. for photographers it can be very useful for recording a GPS track that you can later synchronize with your photos to geo-tag them. Why buying a pricey GPS tagger for your camera when you already have it on your phone? Price: Free (but you can donate €4,99 via plugin)

Easy release

Easy release replaces traditional paper model releases that you had to carry with you. You can simply input all necessary info and the model and witness can sign on the touch screen of your phone. you can save this in PDF and email it to your computer – easily done! It is also approved by most major stock agencies such as Getty images, iStock or Alamy. Price: €8,15

Google maps

Not really a photography app, but helps with planning a lot. Very powerful and precise maps, terrain and satellite view especially. Some of the apps above have Google maps integrated and without it they wouldn’t be half that useful as they are now. I recommend that you cache the area you want to travel to when you still have wi-fi access to prevent unnecessary costs or when going into area without mobile signal.  Price: Free

Sky map

Very cool app that shows you position of the stars and planets. Very fun for everybody. And useful when you need to determine where the particular stars are located (handy for star-trails and milky-way photography). Price: Free

So this is the list of the apps on my phone. Hopefully you will find them useful and that they will help you with your photography. Feel free to leave a comment and to share this post! Thank you!