Optimal Windows
Overview
Rather than reading four environmental screens for each of your locations in turn, Optimal Windows scans them all at once and ranks the hours worth driving for — combining light, the forecast, the tide and wildlife activity into a single score out of 10.
Accessing Optimal Windows
Planning tab → Optimal Windows
Without Apex Lucis Pro a scan covers your three nearest locations over three days. It is a real scan, ranked and complete — just a smaller one. Pro scans every saved location in range across ten days. The locations a free scan left out are named below your results, behind Unlock with Pro.
Choosing What Gets Scanned
Two pickers sit at the top of the screen.
Near The place distances are measured from. Defaults to where you are, but you can pick any saved location instead — set it to the coast you are driving to next month and the scan answers “what should I plan for the trip?” rather than “what is good near me tonight?”.
Within How far from that place to look — 25, 50, 100, 250 or 500 km, or Any distance. Shown in miles if that is your distance unit (Settings → Region).
Underneath, a line tells you how many locations that leaves: “8 of 21 locations in range of Bamburgh”.
If nothing is in range, Search Any Distance widens it in one tap. With no saved locations at all, the screen offers Add Location.
A radius is the fastest way to shorten a scan. On a long location list, narrowing from Any distance to 100 km makes an obvious difference to how long Scan Locations takes.
Running a Scan
Tap Scan Locations. A progress bar shows how far through your locations it has got, with Cancel if you change your mind.
When it finishes, tap Scan Again in the toolbar any time you want to run it again — the forecast moves, so a scan you ran on Monday is worth re-running on Thursday. Your previous results stay on screen while it runs, with a progress bar and Cancel above them. On a Mac, View → Scan Locations (⌘R) does the same.
What It Shows
The best window of the scan comes first, named in a sentence — “Thursday’s sunset at Bamburgh” — with its times, score and verdict.
Below it, the windows are grouped by day — “Today”, “Tomorrow”, “Thursday 17 October” — best first within each day. Each card carries:
- The location, date, and start and end time — in the location’s own time, with its time zone shown when it differs from yours
- What kind of window it is — golden hour, blue hour, sunrise, sunset, low tide, moonrise, Milky Way or wildlife activity
- The score out of 10, with the light, weather, colour and tide scores beside it — or No forecast when the weather couldn’t be scored
- The main reason under the location name, then the rest with a tick, and anything to watch out for marked with a warning sign
- Any species active at that location that month
Tap a card to open Light & Sky for that place and day; Done brings you back to your results.
After a scan, chips along the top filter to one kind of window, each with its count. Show All Windows clears the filter. The footer says when you last scanned, and names any locations scored without a forecast.
How Far Ahead It Looks
A scan reaches ten days — as far as the weather forecast goes. Sun, moon and tide times are available far beyond that, but a window is only worth ranking when there is a real forecast behind it.
Two rules shape the list:
- Only windows scoring 6 or more appear. Below that it is not a shoot worth the alarm clock.
- At most four windows from any one day, so a Saturday with six locations in range cannot bury a quiet Tuesday that had the better sky.
Windows that have already finished are dropped, so this morning’s golden hour never takes a slot from something you can still shoot.
Turning a Window Into a Booking
Every window card carries a Create Booking button.
The booking opens ready to edit, titled for the window and the place — “Golden Hour at Bamburgh” — with the window’s own start and end times and the location already attached. Nothing is saved until you tap Save.
The notes keep the reasoning: the overall score, the light, weather and tide scores behind it, the reasons listed on the card, and anything to watch out for. Six weeks later a bare “8/10” tells you nothing, but “low tide exposes the causeway” still does.
Once saved, the booking’s Shoot Conditions card carries the light for that day — sunrise, and when golden hour opens and closes — so you do not need to come back here to look it up. Switch on the booking’s own alerts to be told before the light or the tide arrives. See Notifications.
Scores are worked out from the forecast at the time you ran the scan. The notes say so, and the further ahead the window, the more worth re-checking nearer the date.
How the Composite Score Is Calculated
Each window’s score (out of 10) blends up to four factors, weighted the same way for every window:
| Factor | Weight | Included when |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 35% | Always |
| Weather | 35% | A WeatherKit forecast is available for the window |
| Tides | 20% | The location is coastal |
| Wildlife | 10% | The location has species saved against it that are active in that month |
If a factor doesn’t apply to a window — tides at an inland location, for example — Apex Lucis leaves it out entirely and reweights the remaining factors proportionally, rather than penalising the score for data that was never going to exist. This is why two windows can each show a perfect light score but end up with different composite totals: one might be coastal and picking up a tide contribution the other doesn’t have.