PhotoPills might be the most popular app for planning photoshoots. However, there is another feature-rich app that can do even more. In this video, Alyn Wallace shows the app Planit Pro and some of its unique features.
If you read my article about night photography and saw the included video, you know I'm a fan of Planit Pro. It's my favorite tool for pre-visualizing my landscape and night photos. It has a powerful VR mode and 3D terrain maps, allowing very detailed planning of the perfect camera position.
As Wallace shows in his video, those 3D terrain maps also include iconic buildings for some cities. Those models make executing challenging night photo shoots easy, even using a long lens. In his example, he shows the planning for an image of the crescent moon behind one of the large mosques in Istanbul. The result perfectly matches his plan.
Wallace continues to share additional features of Planit Pro that are not yet available in PhotoPills. It seems the team at PhotoPills is also working on a major update, which should bring its feature set closer to that of Planit.
Since both apps are not very expensive, I will continue to use both for now. I prefer PhotoPills' AR mode in the field, while I like to use Planit for in-advance planning. It also allows me to save offline maps, which is important when I travel. Because it's not as intuitive to use as PhotoPills, I'd encourage anybody who wants to give it a try to check the Planit documentation here.
Just comparing the two, PhotoPills is more intuitive / easier to use. But yes, there's certainly room for improvement. Lets see what the next version of their app brings.