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Writer's pictureWarren and Mary

Our 6 Favorite Apps for Exploring & Photographing the Outdoors

We thought we'd share some of our most used apps as we explore to create! Please leave your favorites in the comments.


This is our go to app for finding new hiking, off-roading, camping and backpacking trails to explore. You can sort by difficulty level, length, rating, activity, attractions and more. The app includes user reviews, images and map recordings of trails. AllTrails has a free version and a Pro version which costs $29.99 per year. We pay for the Pro version as it allows us to access a few extra map types and download the maps for offline use.



PhotoPills is our go-to app for night photography. The $9.99 cost is completely worth all this app offers. We got the app primarily to plan Milky Way shots. This app allows us to understand where and when the Milky Way will rise and set based on our desired location. It shows the moon phases, sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset times by date. This makes it easy for us to plan our outings. The Augmented Reality View makes it easy to track the Milky Way in the Sky. PhotoPills offers much more than must Milky Way planning though. There are calculators to help with lens choice to get desire Field of View, exposure times to get sharpest stars, and to help with focal length and subject distance. It lists over 10,000 points of interest throughout the world to photograph and so much more! The purchase also provides you access to the PhotoPills Academy with many great how to guides/videos.



Snapseed (IOS, Google)

Snapseed is a great mobile photo editing app that offers professional level tools including the ability to make selective adjustments. The fine tune tool allows you to make adjustments to brightness, shadows, highlights and such. There are options to adjust curves, white balance, perspective and to make selective adjustments. One of our favorites is the HDR Scape which provides the ability to adjust the filter strength, brightness and saturation to your liking. There are also a variety of automatic looks/filters. One major bonus of this app is that it is free.



Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game that uses GPS to help you locate caches hidden in places all over the world. The caches range from micro caches with a log to sign to larger cache that have treasures hidden in them. If you take a treasure you should leave something of equal or greater value behind. Geocaching adds a little extra fun to our adventures. There is a free version of the app, but you can upgrade to premium for a fee to access more geocaches.



Relive creates a 3D video of your activity (off-roading, hiking, biking, etc). It allows you to take pictures along the route and inserts the pictures, including location pins of those pictures, into the video. The video also includes performance metrics such as miles, elevation gain, speed and time to complete your activity. There is a free version, as well as upgrades you can purchase through a subscription.



This is a helpful app for campers or boondockers look for a free place to camp. It has a great community side to it as well that allows you to look for and meetup with other campers in your area and socialize on the forums. Another great feature is you can click on the free campsite locations to get information such as cell phone signal (of multiple providers), safety, weather, cleanliness and more.









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