A Custom Photography Planning App for the Azores

In the last two nights, I built this photo app, custom made for my photography needs. It is like a custom PhotoPills, but with island specific datasets and instructions for the Azores, where I live.

The plan was to build it slowly using @ampcode free credits a little bit every day, but it failed almost immediately because of the hungry token usage of Opus 4.6. I had to switch to Claude. I am currently trying the full $200 plan, which ends on February 12, and I will not renew it because it is too expensive for me. I am also using Codex 5.3. I code most of the logic in Codex and use Claude mainly to fix the design and UI parts.

I also built Boink, an OpenClaw bot powered by this month’s Claude Code. He acts as my assistant and code reviewer. This setup feels like a dream for building apps. We discuss ideas, he proposes the implementation, I feed it to Codex or Claude, and then he reviews everything again at the end. PhotoPro is a photography planning app for chasing the perfect shot. It calculates golden hour, blue hour, moonrise and moonset times, and finds photo opportunities when the moon aligns with landmarks at your location. It tracks full moons, supermoons, eclipses, meteor showers, and comets, all filtered by what is actually visible from my coordinates.

The nerdy bits: meteor shower peaks use solar longitude calculations instead of fixed calendar dates that drift yearly. A binary search algorithm finds the exact peak date for each shower. Location filtering uses radiant declination plus your latitude to calculate maximum altitude. If it will not rise above 10 degrees at your location, it does not appear. Weather scoring has two profiles: sunset, where 30 to 70 percent high clouds are good for red skies, and night, where any clouds are bad.

It is tuned for real conditions. Wind scoring drops to zero above 12 km/h because tripod shots need stability. Low and mid level clouds kill the score because they block the sun, but high cirrus clouds boost it because they catch color. Every threshold is based on real shooting experience in the Azores. A 7 day forecast is integrated so you know which upcoming events are worth waking up for.

The AI challenge: My AI assistant Boink also analyzes the daily weather and scores photo conditions independently. We're running a side-by-side comparison - the app's algorithm vs Boink's assessments - to validate and refine the scoring. When Boink says "tomorrow looks like an 85 for sunset" and the app agrees, we know we're onto something. When they disagree, we dig into why and improve the model. Real-world testing with a second opinion.

Building PhotoPro has been one of the most rewarding projects I have worked on. It combines real shooting experience in the Azores with precise astronomical calculations and practical weather logic, turning raw data into decisions that matter in the field. More than just an app, it represents a workflow tailored to my landscape, my light, and the kind of photography I want to create.