Apex Lucis is the complete platform for professional photographers — business management, location intelligence, and live environmental data, all in one beautifully integrated app.
Works across all your Apple devices. iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Everything from first enquiry to final invoice, designed for how photographers actually work.
The Kanban pipeline moves leads through every stage — Enquiry, Contacted, Quoted, Won — giving you a clear view of your pipeline value at any moment.
Booking management with EventKit calendar sync, automated invoice generation, and overdue payment alerts so nothing slips through the cracks.
Bookings are the core of your photography business in Apex Lucis. A booking represents a confirmed (or tentative) shoot engagement, linking together the client, location, crew, equipment, invoice, contract, and environmental conditions all in one place.
The Clients section stores everyone you shoot for. Each client has a contact profile, booking history, and interaction timeline.
Contacts is your directory of people you work *with* — crew members, freelancers, models, suppliers, and vendors. Unlike Clients (who hire you), Contacts are people you hire or collaborate with.
Track every business cost — from travel and permits to gear purchases and studio hire. Apex Lucis categorises expenses, tracks which are tax-deductible, and includes them in P&L reports.
Insights provides deeper analytics than Profit and Loss, with a focus on business performance trends, lead pipeline health, and operational metrics.
Apex Lucis generates professional invoices with your company branding, itemised packages, tax calculation, and payment details.
A Lead represents a potential booking — someone who has expressed interest but is not yet confirmed. Leads move through a pipeline until they are either won (converted to a booking) or lost.
Packages are reusable pricing templates. Instead of pricing each booking from scratch, you define your standard offerings once and apply them to bookings.
The Profit and Loss screen gives you a complete picture of your photography business's financial health — revenue, expenses, and profit — for any time period.
Precision tools that put you in exactly the right spot when the light is perfect.
The Locations module lets you plan everything you need to know about a location before you visit.
Moon Alignment lets you see the best time to visit a location to get the moon exactly where you need it.
A call sheet is a day-of-shoot schedule. It lists who needs to be where, when, and what they'll be doing — broken into time slots, each with a crew list, location, and attached shot list.
The Crew section (accessible from within a booking's detail) manages the roster of people assigned to a specific shoot — their roles, fees, and model releases.
Track all your photography equipment — what you own, its condition, when it was last serviced, and what insurance covers it. Group gear into kits for quick assignment to shoots.
Your location library. Every place you photograph, scout, or want to remember goes here. Locations can be linked to bookings, environmental data, and moon alignment calculations.
Moon Alignment solves one of landscape photography's most complex planning problems: working out the exact date, time, and camera position needed to photograph the moon rising or setting behind a specific subject, framed at a specific size in the image.
Many photography locations — especially public spaces, parks, beaches, historic buildings, and commercial areas — require permits for professional photography. The Permits manager tracks your applications, their status, conditions, and expiry dates.
A shot list is a pre-planned inventory of individual photographs you intend to capture on a shoot. Planning shots in advance ensures you don't miss anything important and helps you brief your crew efficiently.
If you hire a commercial photography studio rather than shooting on location, Studio Bookings tracks the reservation, the space specifications, and any equipment hired from the studio.
If a shoot requires travel — flying to a location, staying overnight, driving significant distances — the Trip Planner tracks your accommodation and travel legs in one place, calculates mileage claims, and keeps all costs in view.
Real conditions data, intelligently combined into a single shoot score.
Fully offline tide predictions from over 8,000 harmonic stations — no external API. Combined with WeatherKit forecasts to produce a shoot condition score from 0–10.
See what species have been spotted near your planned shoot location.
Use your own Invoices, Model Release Forms and Contracts to ensure brand consistency.
Download Apex Lucis free. Unlock real environmental data with Pro.
Subscription managed via the App Store. Cancel anytime in Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use
Answers to the most common questions, and direct routes to our team when you need us.
Reach our team directly. We respond to all enquiries within 24 hours on business days.
Read the full changelog for every update, including bug fixes and improvements.
Our privacy policy, subscription terms, and the App Store EULA are all referenced here.
Apex Lucis Pro unlocks Business Insights, Profit and Loss reports, the Moon Alignment tool, and the Template Manager for your own branded documents. All other features — business management, location scout, AR overlay, Light & Sky — are free.
Yes — Apex Lucis Pro includes a 30-day free trial. You won't be charged until the trial period ends, and you can cancel at any time from Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions on your iPhone.
Open the Settings app on your iPhone → tap your name at the top → Subscriptions → Apex Lucis Pro → Cancel Subscription. You keep Pro access until the end of your current billing period. Apex Lucis has no ability to process refunds directly — for refunds, use Apple's reportaproblem.apple.com.
The ephemeris engine (sun, moon, golden hour, blue hour) works fully offline, as do tide predictions. WeatherKit and Wildlife require an internet connection initially to get the data, but it's cached on your device afterwards.
The planner uses Apex Lucis's own custom-built ephemeris engine — no third-party astronomy library — accurate to within about 1° when checked against tools like Stellarium and PhotoPills. The alignment tolerance is ±2° azimuth and ±3° altitude by default, which is generous enough to account for atmospheric refraction and typical composition flexibility. You can tighten tolerances down to ±0.5° for more precise planning.
All business data — clients, leads, bookings, invoices — is stored in SwiftData on your device and synced via iCloud CloudKit using your personal iCloud account. We never have access to your business data.
Yes — CloudKit sync is included for all users. Sign in with the same Apple ID on a new Apple Device and your locations, bookings, clients, leads, and wildlife field guides will sync automatically.
Yes — Your data is yours, and we believe that you should have access to it. Using the export feature you can get a spreadsheet of all your stored data.