In the 21st century, there is an app for almost any purpose. Need to keep you physical and mental shape on point, stay in touch with friends across the world, optimize your workflows, or just make your life easier? You got it! In today’s article, we put together a list of useful apps no photographer should live without. Some of them will help you stay organized and feed your creativity, while others will help you better your craft. But you best believe - all of these will help you work smarter, not harder in 2021.
Must-have Apps for Photographers
From to-do lists and note-taking apps, to sun-trackers, photo editors, and storage spaces - there is an app for virtually any purpose that you, as a photographer and creative entrepreneur, might have. We selected 20+ mobile apps to help you become a photography wizard and to make your life easier.
Editing Apps
UNFOLD
Unfold offers beautiful templates to help you create engaging photo collages, edit your photos and videos, and create polished and visually appealing Instagram stories (and not only!) Want to share sneak peeks of your weddings and shoots, or just document your day to day life? Unfold is perfect for that! They have various layouts, curated fonts, and editing tools that will make you feel like a design pro. Create your go-to templates and simply switch pictures and text inside them, or come up with something new and explore their options.
Pricing: Free, with premium templates available for individual purchase or a $2.99/month subscription fee.
VSCO
A great editing tool to help you streamline your workflow and shorten your editing time, with a collection of beautiful presets, and great editing tools. Besides editing options, VSCO has a great community of creatives, who work hard to showcase the best content in and around the world.
Pricing: Free, or get Premium Features with VSCO Membership for $19.99/year
ADOBE LIGHTROOM PHOTO EDITOR
We won’t say much. One of our favorite photo editors also has a great mobile app. It offers easy-to-use editing tools, such as sliders and filters, that will simplify your editing process. Retouch full-resolution photos, apply photo filters, and edit your photos wherever you are.
Pricing: Free to install, you need to have one of Adobe Creative Cloud Plans to fully operate it .
INSTASIZE
If you want to get creative with your Instagram, and unleash your inner artist - this app is your go-to. It doesn’t stop at just editing your photo settings, but it also helps you make stunning images by creating collages, adding borders, inserting text, and playing around with overlays such as grain and vintage textures. More than that, they give you access to thousands of free stock photos for Instagram.
Available on iOS
Pricing: Free, Premium Version - $4.99/month
Weather & Sun Apps
ANY WEATHER APP
It comes without saying, but we’ll mention it anyway. Next time you are planning a shoot, be sure to check out the weather situation. There is nothing more frustrating than ruined plans and muddy shoes (unless it’s planned).
SUNSEEKER
Sunseeker is a comprehensive solar tracking & compass app. It shows the sun’s hourly direction intervals, sunrise and sunset time, twilight time, sun shadow, the golden hour & more. Sunseeker is extremely useful for photographers – to plan your shoots according to the golden hour or blue hour, optimal sunlight conditions, and sunrise and sunset time. It’s also great for videographers, to help you find the sun exposure, directions, sun shadow, and sunrise and sunset time for any location.
Pricing: From $7.49 to $9.99
SUN SURVEYOR
Another great sun and moon tracking app. It will help photographers and filmmakers scout the best locations and plan for the perfect shot with the great light, day or night. Its interface puts emphasis on visualization rather than raw data, and one of its live view features allows you to see the overlays over Google’s Street View for other locations.
Pricing: From $7.99 to $9.99
MAGIC HOUR
Use this app to know when golden hour is coming and how much time you have left once it starts. The app uses your location along with the current day and calculates when golden hour will occur. They also give you information about the moon - when the next moonrise is and when the next full moon will appear.
Available on iOS
Pricing: Free
TIDES NEAR ME
If you are a coastal photographer or videographer - you really need this app, or any tide app for that matter. It gives you information about tide times, so you can plan your shoots along coastal areas accordingly - from knowing where to be at a certain hour to knowing when to leave.
Available on iOS and Android
Pricing: Free
Business & Productivity Apps
ANY POMODORO TIMER APP
The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity system that helps you split your working time into deep work intervals, followed by the right number of breaks – so that you can get work done, take regular breaks and avoid burnout. Usually, it breaks your workdays into 25-minute focus time periods, followed by 5-minute breaks. The Pomodoro app sets the timer for you, and lets you know when is the time to focus and when is the time to relax.
EVERNOTE
A powerful app to help you track your to-dos, scheduled photoshoots, or wish-lists. Evernote lets you handle notes in almost any format you want – text notes, sketches, checkboxes, audio clips and voice memos, images, attachments, PDF documents, scanned hand-written pages, emails - basically any format you can think of. It’s just a great place to throw all your ideas in, to make sure you don’t forget anything important. You can also install Evernote as a desktop app and sync your account between different devices at any time.
Price: Limited free plan; $7.99/month for Evernote Premium with unlimited devices and offline mobile access.
DROPBOX
One of our favorite storage apps, Dropbox not only helps you keep all your documents and photos in one place, but also lets you easily share them with clients and peers. Another feature that we love is Dropbox Paper – it’s like your very own creative space for writing down ideas, blog posts, social media captions, and more – and having your team members, partners, and clients collaborate on it.
Available on iOS and Android, Paper - on iOS and Android
Price: Apps are Free, and depending on your needs, you can either get a paid Plan - up to $16.99/month. Check out all Dropbox individual plans here.
THINGS
Their slogan is “Get Things, Get Done” – which is pretty self-explanatory, right? Things is like your personal task manager that lets you organize your time, schedule projects, set reminders, and write to-do’s – everything to help you get things done. The best news is that you can easily sync your account between your devices via iCloud.
Available on iOS
Price: The macOS version costs $49.99 but offers a 15-day free trial. The iPad version costs $19.99, and the iPhone version costs $9.99.
HONEYBOOK
The ultimate goal of any CRM system is to help you organize and optimize everything, from your booking process and contact forms, to client communication, contracts, and payment reminders. Getting HoneyBook is like hiring your own personal assistant, yet HoneyBook is more budget-friendly and works around the clock.
Price: HoneyBook offers a free 7 days trial for all photographers and small businesses located in Canada and the USA. Their plan starts at $34/month, and we have a 50% discount code for you. Claim it here.
GOOGLE CALENDAR
Need we say more?
Price: Free
SQUARESPACE MOBILE APPS SUITE
If you are on Squarespace and want to have control over your site at all times - you will love these. Squarespace’s mobile apps suite lets you edit your site's pages, manage your appointments or online store and track your site's Analytics directly from your phone. Our favorites are Squarespace App, Squarespace Commerce App, and Squarespace Analytics App.
Available on iOS and Android
Price: Free
LATER
Later is a social media Scheduling and Analytics tool that helps you visually plan your social posts, publishes automatically and offers tailored insights and analytics. The Conversations and Analytics tabs let you stay on top of all your messages and mentions and assess how your posts perform respectively. Their scheduling feature works with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The great thing about Later is that it has a free forever plan that's often enough for you as a photographer.
Price: Free for individuals 1 social set, 30 posts included. Their paid Starter plan starts at $12.50/month
PLANOLY
An alternative to Later is Planoly – a tool that lets you plan and schedule your content for Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. This app has a lot of great features: you can create and customize content for all of your social channels using their beautiful selection of designer templates, track your follower counts, your post performance, analyze key metrics, schedule posts, and more.
Price: Free for individual profiles, 2 social profiles, and 30 posts per month/profile. Their paid Solo Plan starts at $7/month
Master your Craft & Education Apps
UNSCRIPTED POSING APP
Unscripted is an amazing app for photographers that offers hundreds of posing prompts for your photoshoots, as well as camera settings recommendations, a sun tracker, and many other cool features.
Price: Free. Their premium plan is $15/month paid monthly, or $99/year
HOW I SHOT THIS
Not an actual mobile app, but an amazing tool to help you in your photography endeavors. Created by Melli and Shayne, HIST is an educational platform, where they fully debunk each photo that they’ve taken – from composition and lighting to camera settings, subject positioning, and the story behind it.
Price: Their plans start at €12/month
HEADSPACE
This one doesn’t require much description. Just a great meditation and mindfulness app. Because at the end of the day, even (s)heroes need to take a moment and clear their heads.
Price: Annual - first 14 days free, $5.83/month, billed annually at $69.99, or Monthly - first 7 days free, $12.99/month
We hope this list comes in handy! If you are a photographer who’s looking for even more free and affordable tools, check out this article - here we compiled over a dozen of them. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for weekly dozes of website inspiration, useful tips, and exclusive offers.
Creatively yours,
Squaremuse Team