Landscape photography planning for Mac

The problem

Planning is scattered across tools that were not built for it

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. The forecast lives in a general weather app that reports rain and temperature, which is close to irrelevant when what decides the picture is whether the mid-level cloud sits high enough to catch colour twenty minutes before sunrise.

A photography weather app has to answer a different question from a weather app. Not "will it rain", but "is this morning worth the alarm clock".

Spots

A photo spot organiser for Mac that keeps the library yours

FRAMEWARD stores spots in a database on your own machine. There is no account to create and no cloud to sync with. Photographs, notes, coordinates and the reasons a place is worth returning to stay on the Mac they were entered on.

• Photos and notes on the spot itself, so the context does not live in a separate folder that drifts out of sync.
• Collections to group spots by region, by project, or by the conditions that make them work.
• Sensitive-spot protection for the places you do not want to hand out, which matters more each year in locations that are being loved to death.
• GPX import, so a track you already walked can become a set of spots instead of being retyped.

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.

When a feature does need an outside service, the app shows the exact fields it would send and waits for you to approve the call. That happens every time, not once at install.

Conditions

A weather forecast for landscape photographers, not a general forecast

FRAMEWARD reads forecast data and interprets it for the phenomena photographers actually plan around: sunrise and sunset colour, fog seas, starry nights, storm light and fresh snow. A regional layer scores the coming days across the area your spots cover, so you can compare mornings instead of reading one number for one place.

Each score draws on 144 forecast samples and on measured cloud layers at low, mid and high altitude, because a sky that turns colour needs cloud in the right layer and clear air underneath it. Every score carries a stated confidence.

Maps

Maps that stay on the disk

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. No API key is needed and no map account is involved.

The map belongs to the one-time purchase rather than to the optional weather feed. If the feed lapses, day scores pause and the regions you downloaded keep working.

From plan to field

Trip preparation, packing and export

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.

1. Build the trip from spots you already saved, as ordered stops along one route.
2. Check the days against the regional scores, and pick the morning that is actually worth it.
3. Pack from a gear list that carries honest weights, so the total is a real number rather than an optimistic one.
4. Export to your GPS as GPX or KML, because the device on the dashboard is often not the Mac.
5. Take a Field Pack offline, so the plan survives the moment the signal does not.

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.

Limits

What FRAMEWARD does not do

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.

• It does not guarantee conditions. Scores are interpretations with stated confidence, and forecasts change.
• It is not a camera or an editor. Nothing here processes your photographs.
• Conditions scoring needs a connection. Your library, trips, gear lists, Field Packs, light times and downloaded map regions work offline; fetching new forecasts does not.
• It is a Mac application. Not a web app and not a phone app, which is a deliberate choice about where sit-down planning actually happens.
• It is not released yet. The details on this page describe the application as it is being built for its first release.

Availability

How it is sold

FRAMEWARD is a native macOS application, sold directly from this site rather than through the App Store. It ships as a universal build for Apple silicon and Intel. Exact minimum system requirements are confirmed at release.

• The app is a one-time purchase at launch pricing of about EUR 49, including resident offline maps.
• FRAMEWARD Live is the optional weather feed behind the day scores, about EUR 39 a year or EUR 4.50 a month, with six months included in the purchase.
• If Live lapses the app keeps working. Day scores pause; spots, trips, maps, exports, gear lists and light times stay.
• A 14-day full trial comes before any payment, with no card required.

Launch pricing shown, final numbers confirmed at release. Payment, VAT and receipts are handled by a merchant of record.

Hear when it ships

Occasional development notes and one email when it ships. Unsubscribe anytime.
Your address only, confirmed by a click. Privacy notice.