Store your favorite locations with MapAPic for iOS, a convenient, full-featured location scout app
posted Wednesday, June 7, 2017 at 10:00 AM EDT
There are many location apps available for photographers on iOS, but one of the best I’ve seen is MapAPic from Sea to Software. The developer recently updated his app and reached out to me with a code to download and try the app for myself. No other compensation was received for the review below.
Basically, MapAPic allows you to instantly save any location using your phone’s GPS functionality and log photos using your phone’s camera and your photo library. Additionally, you can create locations with existing pictures provided that their EXIF data has GPS data. After saving a location, you can make notes about the location and even get sunrise, sunset, golden and blue hour information for any of your saved locations for a selected date.
To help keep your locations organized, you can search your list, view them on a map or utilize a tags system. You can mark your favorite locations accordingly as well. To share information with others, you can email them as PDFs or print locations. Further, your locations can be backed up via Dropbox in the app.
I enjoy the app a lot and it will likely be my go-to app for storing location information. I like that there’s an easy way to keep notes for each location, as I often make notes about places I’ve shot, including considerations for future trips. My only criticism of the app is that I can’t change the map view. I would prefer a satellite map view rather than the standard street view map. For landscape photography, a lot of my locations are not near a street and a satellite view would provide me a better view of my saved locations. Another neat feature would be the ability to share and search through locations. Suppose I am in a new area, it would be great if I could browse stored locations from other users, if they opted to share them publicly.
MapAPic is available in two versions, MapAPic LE and MapAPic. MapAPic LE is free and the full MapAPic version is $4.99. If you’re on the fence, download the free version and try it for yourself.