Sun-position apps vs printed tables: an honest comparison
There are three ways to know when the light does what you need: an augmented-reality sun app on your phone, a plain calculator (like ours), and a static table you can read in three seconds. Since we publish one of the three, you should read this comparison with a skeptic’s eye — so we’ll say upfront where our own tool loses, not just where it wins.
Key takeaways
- AR apps (PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, Sun Surveyor) answer “where will the sun be relative to that building?” — something no table can do.
- Tables answer “when is golden hour in October?” in one glance, with no battery, account or signal — ideal for recurring shoots and permit paperwork.
- All of them run on the same astronomy. Serious apps use high-precision ephemerides; our tables use NOAA’s public-domain formulas, validated to within 3 minutes of official almanacs (see the method page).
- The real divide isn’t app vs table — it’s planning at a desk vs standing on location. Most working shooters use both.
What each tool is actually good at
| AR sun app | Web calculator (ours) | Printed / static table | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun path over real terrain | Excellent — camera overlay | No (numbers only) | No |
| Speed of a quick lookup | Slow (open app, wait GPS) | Fast | Fastest |
| Works with no signal / no battery | No | Needs the page cached | Yes |
| Custom coordinates | Yes | Yes | No — fixed city |
| Explains its own maths | Rarely | Yes | Varies |
| Cost | Often paid | Free | Free |
Where apps win, decisively
The killer feature of an AR sun app is not the numbers — every source has the same numbers to within a minute or two — but the projection: point your phone at a street and see where the sun will sit at 17:40 next Thursday. For alignment shots (a backlit bridge, light through a gap between towers, a face lit through a specific window) that visual answer is unbeatable, and no table or calculator we publish will replace it. If you shoot paid alignments, buy one of the well-known apps; they earn their price.
Where tables win — and where ours lose
A static monthly table, like our city pages, is the fastest planning surface there is: one glance answers “roughly when is blue hour in Tokyo in March?” without unlocking anything. Tables are also the natural artifact for communicating with other people — an assistant, a location owner, a permit form that wants call times. The honest weaknesses: a table can’t leave its reference point (ours are pinned to one coordinate per city, so a suburb 20 km away can differ by a minute or two); it can’t see your horizon (hills and buildings — see our limitations section); and it only knows the bands it was built with — which is why we state our golden-hour and blue-hour definitions explicitly instead of letting you assume they match your app’s.
A sane combined workflow
- At the desk: pull the month’s rhythm from a city table to pick the shoot date (you want a date whose sunset direction and window length fit the concept).
- Same week: run the exact date on a calculator and write the timeline — arrive, golden start, sunset, civil end.
- On location: verify with an AR app for the specific sightline, and keep a printed copy of the times in your pocket for when the phone dies at the worst moment, as it will.
A pocket notebook that never needs charging
The oldest sun-planning tool: write the call times down. A small all-weather notebook survives every shoot condition your phone won’t.
Check price →Related reading
- How sunrise times are calculated — what’s under every tool’s hood
- Planning a blue-hour cityscape shoot — the workflow above, in full
- Best light for real-estate photography — tables in daily professional use