Most of a landscape photograph is decided before the camera comes out of the bag. Which spot, which morning, which route, what to carry. This page explains how FRAMEWARD handles that work on macOS, and what it deliberately does not do.
FRAMEWARD is a landscape photography planning app for macOS. It is in development, and the waitlist at the bottom of this page is how you hear when it ships.
A spot lives in a screenshot. Another lives in a pin dropped in a maps app two years ago, with no note about why it was worth stopping. A general weather forecast gives useful information about rain and temperature. Planning a photograph can also mean looking at cloud layers and light around sunrise.
FRAMEWARD brings saved places, trip preparation and forecast ingredients into one Mac workspace.
FRAMEWARD stores Spots in a local database on your own machine. There is no account to create and no library sync. Photographs, notes, coordinates and the reasons a place is worth returning to stay on the Mac they were entered on.
As location scouting software this is the boring, durable half of the job: not finding one photogenic place once, but keeping years of them in a form you can still search when you need somewhere within two hours of home that works in side light.
Apple receives the visible map area while the online map is open. Check weather sends only the selected Spot's saved shooting coordinates to Apple Weather. A Sensitive Spot asks for one-use permission first. Spot names, notes, photographs and local paths stay on the Mac. The conditions field requests a region block and an hour, never a Spot, a name or a coordinate. Its server sees ordinary connection data and keeps no account. The offline map makes no request.
Apple Weather is available to every FRAMEWARD user. It gives current conditions, hourly and daily forecasts and available alerts for one selected Spot, and it is included equally in Basic and in Complete.
The conditions field is the other layer, and it comes with Complete. It reads ICON-EU, the open regional model of the German weather service, in cells of about 7 km, and interprets it for the phenomena photographers actually plan around: afterglow, a clear path toward the sun, golden clouds, sunrise and sunset light, blue hour, photographic contrast, long exposure conditions, low, mid and high cloud cover, sea of fog, starry night, storm light and fresh snow. It paints the coming hours over the map you are looking at, so you can compare places instead of reading one number for one place.
FRAMEWARD's server at field.frameward.app converts each ICON-EU model run into signed region files. Your Mac downloads files for the visible map area in Europe and interprets them locally. Forecast hours are available hourly through three days and every three hours through five days. A sky that turns colour needs cloud in the right layer and clear air underneath it, so the readings come from the model's own cloud layers. Every hour ranks its best areas with a plain reason, and a check on one Spot reads the same cells. Apple Weather data is never used for the field.
A reading is an uncalibrated interpretation of forecast ingredients, not a probability and not a safety forecast. It can be wrong. The conditions field stays completely separate from Apple Weather.
You download the world overview once, then the regions you actually shoot. Those map regions are stored on your disk rather than fetched while you travel, so the map still works on a ridge with no signal. The world overview and detailed regions are included in Basic, with no account required.
Offline maps remain available independently from the conditions field. When Apple Maps is unavailable, FRAMEWARD falls back to map data stored on your Mac. The offline map makes no map-provider request.
A planning app earns its place in the hour before you leave, when the question stops being where to go and becomes what order to drive it in and what is still on the kitchen table.
Record the cameras, lenses, tripods, filters and accessories you own, including brand, model, notes and weight. Assign the equipment you plan to carry to a specific Trip and see the packed total before leaving. Gear stays on your Mac.
Gear inventory, assigning Gear to a Trip and tracking packed weight are all included in Basic. Nothing renews.
Light times sit alongside all of it: blue hour, golden hour and sun bearings for the day and the place, so an arrival time is a decision rather than a guess.
Being specific about the edges is more useful than a feature list, and it is how you can tell whether this fits your way of working.
FRAMEWARD is a macOS app coming to the Mac App Store. The current private beta targets Apple silicon and macOS 15. Final compatibility will be confirmed in the App Store listing.
The price is confirmed when the App Store listing opens, in your local currency. Purchases, receipts, VAT and refunds are handled by Apple under its own terms.
Occasional development notes and one email when it ships. Confirm your email address to join; unsubscribe anytime. Privacy notice.