OutDoors Great Britain
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Price £1.99/ Available for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
OutDoors Great Britain by RoadTour, with national parks Ordnance Survey maps, is an ideal app for walkers and hikers, with an obvious overlap for landscape photographers looking for known walking routes throughout the UK.
The basic £1.99 app comes with a pre-loaded 1:250K map of Great Britain, but for 1:50k scale Ordnance Survey downloads you can pay anything from nothing (for one or two maps only) up to £29.99 (for a full county, which is around 600MB of data).
The National Park OS map costs £11.99, while regional maps for the South East England and North East England cost £9.99.
Where this app beats traditional mapping is in its tie-in to your iPhone's GPS. It's possible to track your exact location, and even create your own routes in real time.
Better still, head to everytrail.com and it's possible to download other users' GPX files to import maps from fellow walkers, although you'll still need the (pay-for) scale map download for that associated area to reap the benefits at a decent, close-up scale.
Without the need for an internet connection (Wi-Fi and 3G will make no odds to performance, because they're not used), once the map data is downloaded it's ready to go.
Verdict
Despite the accuracy of OS Maps (we're talking the standard Ordnance Survey with keys and interest points – not the paved roadways of Google Maps), there's not a distinct photographic angle here. Teaming up with fellow photographers to share pictures, locations and routes is something that can, in part, be achieved without requiring an app in the first instance.
It's a useful app for landscape photographers whether they are planning a shoot, out with a camera or reviewing and keywording images.
