What’s New in TPE Web 4.8

TPE Web 4.8, released today, brings a major expansion of the 3D planning experience, introduces Presets for quickly switching between different planning setups, and adds a powerful new Search and Command Palette.

There are also significant improvements to Visual Search, Shot Alignment, saved planning resources, keyboard navigation and the overall reliability of the 3D view.

First Person 3D is now available to everyone

The First Person 3D view is now available without a subscription.

Open /3d and you’ll start in First Person view using the new Outline ground mode. It renders the landscape as a clean line drawing, emphasising ridges, skylines and terrain occlusion so you can see exactly what lies in front of a sunset, moonrise or other celestial target.

Standard Buildings are rendered in the same style, while the Moon retains its phase and celestial targets are shown as simple markers.

The three First Person ground modes are now:

• Outline – a sketch-line terrain view, available to everyone
• Shaded (formerly “ Terrain ”) – PRO, with map imagery, sunlight and terrain shadows
• Photorealistic – MAX, using Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles

Standard 3D buildings are also now available to everyone, while Enhanced buildings are now also included with PRO.

A new interactive comparison available from the 3D controls lets you see what each subscription level adds to the same scene.

Enabling Outline Mode

We’ve consolidated the old orbit/FPV switch (formerly top right) and the FPV mode control (formerly in the settings panel, lower left) into a single streamlined control:

New: Presets

Presets let you save the way you like TPE configured and restore it in a single step.

A Preset can remember things such as:

• the current page and panels
• map provider, base map and layers
• First Person or Orbit view and 3D ground mode
• sky and lighting settings
• weather model and layer
• timeline scale
• displayed celestial bodies
• analysis tool and target

Presets deliberately don’t change your locations, date, time or camera position. They describe how you want to work, rather than the shot you’re working on.

For example, you might create separate Presets for landscape planning, Milky Way photography, weather assessment or detailed 3D visualisation.

Presets can be selected from the toolbar or the new Command Palette. Your first nine are also immediately available using Option+1–9 on Mac or Alt+1–9 on Windows.

Presets sync to your account and can be organised, renamed, favourited, imported and exported through the Library.

New Search and Command Palette

Press Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows to open the new Search and Command Palette.

It combines place search with access to your:

• Saved Locations
• Shot Plans
• Visual Searches
• Presets

It can also run commands directly. You can swap pins, set the time to now, switch Presets, save a Shot Plan, navigate to another part of TPE and perform many other common actions without reaching for the mouse.

Available keyboard shortcuts are displayed alongside commands, making the palette a useful way to discover TPE’s keyboard controls as you work.

How it works

Typing a place name or coordinates that you want to search for works just as before, but now, if there are matches in your saved locations, shot plans etc., we show those too, so you can apply them directly from the search form:

Additionally, you can prefix your search with an asterisk (*) and it will match only saved resources instead of searching the web for place name matches.

If you type > the text you type will be matched to the list of available commands. For example, typing >now and then Enter will set the date and time to now. There are many commands available and we plan to add more. For users who like driving an app via the keyboard, these commands can speed things up considerably.

And Cmd+S / Ctrl+S now does what you’d expect inside TPE: it saves the current Shot Plan.

Visual Search now shows what’s possible

Visual Search in the 3D view can now show the region of sky that your selected celestial body can actually reach.

This matters because celestial bodies don’t appear just anywhere in the sky. The Sun, for example, remains between approximately ±23.4° declination, while the Moon’s limits vary over its 18.6-year cycle.

When Visual Search is open, TPE can now draw the body’s reachable region directly in the 3D scene, alongside the area you’ve asked it to search.

If your requested area cannot be reached, TPE tells you before you run the search. It can distinguish between an area that isn’t reachable during the selected search period and one that cannot be reached from your current latitude at all.

Empty search results are more informative too. TPE can now explain whether you need a longer search duration, a larger search area or a different location.

As a bonus, this geometry allows impossible dates to be skipped entirely, making Sun and particularly Moon searches significantly faster without changing the results.

Double Alignments

Shot Alignment isn’t limited to astronomical targets anymore.

Place the primary pin on one landmark and the secondary pin on another, more distant landmark, then choose Secondary pin as the Shot Alignment target. TPE will show the possible camera positions from which the two landmarks align.

That makes it possible to answer questions such as: Where can I stand to place this building directly in front of that mountain?

Once you’ve selected a shooting position, you can continue into Visual Search to find when the Sun, Moon or another celestial target completes the composition.

There’s also a new one-step Undo alignment selection command, making it easy to experiment with different shooting positions without losing your original pins.

Open locations in Google Maps

The Share dialogue now includes Open in Google Maps.

You can either show the primary or secondary pin directly in Google Maps or request directions to it from your current location.

On mobile devices with Google Maps installed, the location opens directly in the app.

Import PlanIt Pro markers

In addition to PlanIt Pro .pft plans, TPE can now import .mrk marker files.

Imported markers become saved TPE locations, preserving available information such as the marker name, position, notes, height and other metadata contained in the file.

Shot Plans now describe the shot, not your workspace

We’ve clarified the distinction between Shot Plans and Presets.

A Shot Plan now stores the things that define the photograph: date and time, locations and heights, map position, field of view, celestial bodies and analysis tool.

Presentation choices such as your base map, layers, panels and 3D viewing mode belong to Presets instead.

As a result, opening a Shot Plan no longer unexpectedly changes the way you’ve configured the app. There’s one important exception: opening a Shot Plan may change the selected bodies and targets. After all, if your Shot Plan is for the Pleiades above Lone Eagle Peak, there’d be no point in leaving the Pleiades unselected.

We’ve also improved list management: the lists containing a Shot Plan or Visual Search can now be selected directly from its Edit dialogue.

Improved 3D controls and rendering

The 3D controls have been reorganised around a single view menu for Orbit, Outline, Shaded and Photorealistic modes.

Other 3D improvements include:

• free First Person zoom now reaches 800mm equivalent, useful for checking distant telephoto alignments
• a new Red night mode setting lets you choose between red-adapted and neutral night rendering
• celestial targets are drawn as rings so the underlying star field remains visible
• planets are shown at their true angular size in First Person view
• Full Screen mode now remains active as you move between TPE pages
• First Person camera height is more accurately anchored to the terrain beneath the pin

The 3D view is also considerably more resilient to network, tile-loading and browser graphics problems. Individual missing map tiles no longer prevent the rest of the terrain from rendering, incomplete terrain is clearly identified, and TPE can automatically recover when the browser temporarily resets its graphics system.

Keyboard and accessibility improvements

TPE’s keyboard controls have received a substantial overhaul.

Shortcuts now work more consistently across pages and no longer interfere with standard browser shortcuts such as Copy, Print and New Window. Geodetics, pin swapping, date stepping and other common controls work without first focusing the map.

Escape now closes only the most recently opened item rather than dismissing several things at once, and keyboard navigation through maps, lists, search results and other controls has been improved throughout the app.

Better saving and syncing

Saved Locations, Shot Plans and Visual Searches now sync to your account shortly after you create or change them, wherever in TPE you make the change.

Previously, some items created outside the Library weren’t uploaded until you subsequently opened the Library. That could make a newly saved item appear to be missing when you switched to another device.

TPE also provides clearer feedback if your browser cannot store a saved item, for example because site storage is disabled or full.

And more

TPE Web 4.8 includes many additional refinements and fixes across the application, including:

• more reliable restoration of your current session after a reload
• improved Library layout and interaction
• better management of Shot Plans and Visual Searches across lists
• duplicate place-search results removed
• improved Geodetics controls and height readouts
• improved Photorealistic 3D detail handling
• fixes to Shot Alignment calculations and inspection
• improved handling of terrain and map-tile loading failures
• numerous keyboard, localisation and accessibility fixes

TPE Web 4.8 is available now at app.photoephemeris.com.