What’s New in PhotoWeather: July 2026

Last month Live Pulse started showing you what’s active right now across your locations without requiring rules. This month introduces a third way to discover photo opportunities — one where you don’t need rules at all — plus rule presets, mobile signal lanes, and a solid round of condition accuracy work.

1. AI Weather Assistant (Web + Mobile, Pro) — Beta

PhotoWeather’s rule engine is built for precision. You set exact thresholds — cloud cover below 25%, visibility above 10 km, wind under 5 m/s — and the engine watches the forecast 24/7, firing alerts when your conditions line up. That’s the deterministic path, and it’s not going anywhere.

The AI Assistant is a different entry point. Instead of defining thresholds, you describe your interests in plain language: “I like landscapes and atmospheric conditions” or “I want to head out on a hike with my 24-105mm, suggest anything.” Pick a planning horizon — now, today, this evening, tonight, or tomorrow morning — and the assistant interprets your forecast data on the fly, returning a plain-language briefing of what’s worth heading out for.

It’s not a replacement for rules. Rules are what watch your conditions around the clock and send you alerts. The assistant is a companion: something you reach for when you want to explore rather than monitor. Think of it as having someone who knows your locations and forecast answer the question “is there anything interesting coming up?” without you having to build a rule for every possibility.

This is an early beta. Try it out and let me know what you think. If it proves useful I’ll develop it further: follow-up questions, suggested rules based on your analysis, and deeper exploration of specific conditions. Your feedback directly shapes what comes next.

2. Rule Presets (Web + Mobile)

Setting up rules one by one works fine when you have a handful of conditions you always watch. But if you shoot in different styles — storm chasing one weekend, calm landscapes the next — switching your whole rule setup was tedious. Presets solve that.

A preset is a named bundle of rules. Three system presets ship with the feature and cover the most common photography interests:

Night Sky — Aurora, Milky Way, dark sky quality, and moonlit conditions
Weather & Drama — Storm chaser, clearing storm, rainbow, light breakthrough, cloudscapes, coastal drama
Landscapes — Painted sky, fiery red sky, golden hour, blue hour, civil twilight

You can apply multiple presets at once — combine Night Sky and Landscapes for a trip that covers both sunrise and astro. Or build your own presets from any combination of rules and name them whatever makes sense to you.

Browse, create, edit, and apply presets from either web or mobile. All your rules stay intact — presets are just a faster way to activate and deactivate them as a group.

3. Mobile Weather Visualization

Until now, mobile showed condition scores as numbers in a table. This month they render as coloured signal lanes stretching across the forecast timeline. Drag horizontally to scrub through hours and watch how fog probability, painted sky potential, golden hour quality, and other conditions evolve across the day. The visual lanes make it immediately obvious whether a condition is peaking, declining, or holding steady — much faster than reading numeric scores hour by hour.

Tap any row in Live Pulse to jump straight to that location’s weather charts with the relevant condition already selected.

4. Live Pulse Customization

Live Pulse has been showing all your locations and a fixed set of conditions since launch. Now you can tailor it: hide locations you don’t need to monitor actively, show or hide individual conditions, and reorder both locations and conditions to put what matters most at the top. Available on both web and mobile.

If you only want to see fog and golden hour across your three primary locations, you can set that up in seconds. If you’re a Pro user tracking a dozen conditions but only three matter this week, hide the rest and focus.

5. Condition Accuracy Improvements

The accuracy work from previous months continues — tightening scoring, removing redundant checks, and reducing false positives.

Painted Sky (formerly Golden Clouds)

First, the name. “Golden Clouds” has been renamed to “Painted Sky” everywhere — it’s what photographers actually call the phenomenon when mid-level clouds catch warm, low-angle light and turn into a canvas of colour. The underlying formula is unchanged; only the name is new.

Rainbow

Rainbow scoring got two meaningful changes this month. Directional probe evidence — the system’s ability to check whether sunlight is actually reaching the antisolar point — now carries more weight in the overall score. When the geometry lines up, the model is more confident; when it doesn’t, the score drops accordingly. Event summaries have also been rewritten to describe what’s happening in the solar and antisolar zones in plain terms, rather than showing generic probe data.

Base scoring also got tighter precipitation requirements. The previous setup could fire on moisture in the atmosphere without an actual rain shaft for the light to hit. Fewer false positives as a result.

Cloudscapes

The cloudscapes template has been simplified to a single cloud drama score threshold. The old formula had separate cloud layer and visibility requirements in addition to the drama score, but those were redundant — the drama score already accounts for cloud structure, layering, and visibility. Removing the duplicate gating means the condition fires more reliably when there’s genuinely dramatic cloud structure overhead.

Storm & Coastal

Scoring thresholds have been loosened. The previous cutoffs were calibrated too strictly and missed real photographic storm and coastal conditions. If you’ve had storm rules that rarely fired despite good-looking forecasts, this should help.

Fog Headlines

Fog alert titles previously used the fog probability to estimate expected visibility. Probability and visibility are now independent: probability means probability, visibility means actual forecast density. The headlines now reflect what the forecast actually says about how thick the fog will be, not a probability-derived guess.

Milky Way Template

The Milky Way system preset now correctly requires astronomical night. The previous version could suggest Milky Way conditions during nautical twilight when the sky is still too bright. This matches what you’d actually need in the field.

6. Polish

Inactive Location Cleanup — Rules can no longer reference inactive locations, and inactive locations are hidden from opportunity filters. If you’ve archived a location, it won’t show up in dropdowns or filter lists anymore.

Mobile Sign-Out — Fixed an issue where signing out of the mobile app wouldn’t fully clear cached data, which could cause stale state on the next sign-in.

I build PhotoWeather primarily around my own photography needs — that’s where most of the ideas come from. But I know my needs aren’t yours, and I want to learn more about what would make the product better for the way you shoot. New conditions? Different notification behaviour? Better calendar integration? reach out at support@photoweather.app. I’m a solo developer and your perspective directly shapes where this goes.

Clear skies, Pontus