Location scouting · Desktop today · Phones next · v0.1.0 beta
Scout the place.
Read the light.
Come back when it's good.
Drop a pin on anywhere worth shooting. Tag it, note the parking, and let OnLocation tell you exactly when the golden hour lands on that spot — today, next Tuesday, or the morning you finally get up early. Your pins, your photos, your phone. No feed, no followers, nobody discovering your waterfall.
- 3
- Tabs, total
- 0
- Accounts
- 1440
- Minutes, scrubbable
- 1,869
- Tests passing
Map tab · 402 × 874
Section 01 — What it does
Everything you currently keep in a notes app, a map app, and your head
F-01
Pin it where you stand
HERE drops a pin on your fix. TAP arms a crosshair and puts one wherever you point. Name it something better than "New location". Or don't.
F-02
Tags that do work
water, sunset, ruins, "no parking after 6". Search by all of them or any of them, inside a radius you drag, nearest first.
F-03
The light, per pin, per day
Sunrise, sunset, blue hour, golden hour and the sun's bearing at any minute you scrub to — with the rays drawn on the map from that exact pin.
F-04
Photos filed by place
Shoot or import into a location and the album sorts itself. EXIF GPS, time and tags come along; anything without a fix wears a NO GPS badge, honestly.
F-05
Notes for future you
Access, parking, permits, which fence is climbable and which farmer isn't. The stuff you swore you'd remember and never do.
F-06
Works where the signal doesn't
Pins, notes, photos and sun maths are all local. Map tiles cache. The good spots are rarely near a tower.
Section 02 — A look inside
Three tabs, one sheet, no menus to go hunting in
Map, Places, Gallery. Everything else rises from the bottom as a sheet and goes away when you're done with it.
+ peek sheet
radius + tags
light card
nearest first
shelf → album
Drop real 402 × 874 captures into these five slots.
Section 03 — The light
Drag the day. Find the hour worth driving for.
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
20:52
Golden, evening
20:06–21:13
20:06 — 6° up, bearing 291°
Drag anywhere on the band. In the app the same drag redraws the sun rays on the map from your pin — sunrise, sunset, and where the sun actually is at that minute.
Every location knows its own latitude, so the light is computed for that spot, not for the nearest city. Step the date and the whole day recomputes: bands, times, bearings, rays.
- Blue hour — −6° to −4°. The one everybody sleeps through.
- Golden hour — −4° to +6°. Rarely an hour. Never when convenient.
- Day — above +6°. Harsh, flat, and free.
- Night — the rest. Bring a tripod and a coat.
Polar cases are handled too: “Midnight sun — the sun doesn't set here today.” You're on your own for the mosquitoes.
Section 04 — Pricing
Cheap, recurring, and honest about why
Map tiles cost money every time you pan. Backups cost money every night. A one-off purchase pays for the version you bought and nothing after it — which is how apps quietly stop being maintained. So: a small subscription, priced like a coffee you'd forget about, that keeps the servers lit and gives us a reason to keep improving it.
Scout
Free
forever, no card
- Up to 25 locations
- Tags, notes, search
- Full sun and light maths
- Photos on this device
Field kit · recommended
$2.99 / month
or $29 a year — two months off
- Unlimited locations and photos
- Nightly encrypted backup
- Sync across your own devices
- Offline tile packs for a region
- Export everything, any time
Where the money goes
- Map tiles. Metered, per pan, forever.
- Backup storage. Your photos are large and your phone is fragile.
- Certificates and stores. Apple and Google both want their cut of the paperwork.
- The rest. A reason to keep shipping instead of moving on.
Free while it's in beta, and everything you've already saved stays yours and readable if you ever stop paying.
Section 05 — Your data
The spots you found stay yours
Storage
Locations, tags, notes and photos live in the app's own folder on your device. A plain, readable store you can back up yourself.
Network
Map tiles, and — if you turn it on — your own backup and sync. That is the entire list.
Sharing
Only when you press share, only what you picked. Nothing is public by default and there is no discovery feed to leak your waterfall into.
Telemetry
None. Partly on principle, partly because writing telemetry sounded like work.
Attribution
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Because that's the deal, and it's a good one.
Section 06 — Testimonials, allegedly
Praise from photographers who exist
“I drove two hours to a headland at exactly the wrong time for eleven years. This app fixed that in one afternoon and I'm not entirely over it.”
“My scouting notes used to be forty screenshots of a map app and a text to myself saying 'the gate one'. Now they're a list. Sorted. Nearest first.”
“It told me golden hour was in nine minutes and the bearing was 290°. I made it in seven. The shot is fine. The parking ticket was not.”
Section 07 — Anticipated complaints
Questions you were about to ask
Isn't this just a map app with pins?
A map app doesn't tell you the sun clears that ridge at 20:06 on a bearing of 290°, or which of your pins is 1.2 miles away and tagged water. That's the whole product.
Phones?
That's the point of it, and it's the next build — iOS and Android heads exist in the repo today. The desktop version is what's signed and installable right now.
Does it work with no signal?
Pins, notes, photos and every sun calculation are local. Map tiles cache as you use them, and offline packs are on the paid tier for the places where the bars go away entirely.
How accurate is the sun maths?
NOAA algorithm, computed per location: sunrise/sunset at −0.833°, golden −4° to +6°, blue −6° to −4°. It does not know about your ridge line. Yet.
Why a subscription?
Tiles and backups bill monthly, so pretending a one-off payment covers them would be a lie with a nicer landing page. See the pricing section, which says the quiet part.
Can I get my stuff out?
Export everything whenever you like — locations, tags, notes, photos. Stop paying and it all stays on your device, readable.
Section 08 — Get it
One live build, two in the oven
v0.1.0 beta · free while it's in beta · bring your own daylight.
Windows
Desktop · .exe · x64
iOS
App Store · in the works
Android
APK & Play · in the works
Windows will object first
The installer isn't code-signed, so Defender SmartScreen will stop it and say it “isn't commonly downloaded”. That is not a malware finding — it's a popularity one. Reputation is earned by download count and by a certificate expensive enough to suggest we have investors. We have neither yet, hence Publisher: Unknown, which is accurate and still stings.
In the browser's downloads list, open the ··· menu on the file and choose Keep. When the blue “Windows protected your PC” panel appears on first run, click More info, then Run anyway. If your work laptop has had those options removed by IT, don't fight it — build from source instead.
Go find somewhere good.
Then come back at 20:06, when the light finally agrees with you.
Download for Windowsv0.1.0 beta · Windows 10 / 11 x64 · installs per user