Filmlog Analog

Filmlog Analog is a notebook for analogue photography. It answers the questions that come up between loading a film and getting the scans back: which film is in that camera, which frame are you on, and where did that roll go? CAMERAS Add your cameras, load a film, count the frames. Each camera shows what is loaded and how far along you are. Every roll gets a five-character number when you load it — write it on the canister, and a scan that comes back weeks later still finds its entry. Subject notes with time and place, and a film strip of the shots you took — photographed in the app or picked from your album. LIGHT METER Reads the camera's real exposure values: ISO, time and aperture. Tap the spot you want to measure, then tap an aperture to pin that combination. It tells you when you need a tripod, and says nothing at all when there is too little light for a useful reading. SHUTTER Measure a shutter speed by ear. Hold the phone close to the camera and fire: the microphone hears the shutter, the waveform shows it, and two markers span the time between the two sounds. Underneath stands the measured time, the nearest speed on the dial, and how far off it is in stops. Listen back at a quarter or an eighth speed to hear the two sounds apart — at 1/500 they are two milliseconds apart, and at full speed your ear fuses them into a single click. A rough cross-check, not a measuring instrument. The microphone hears the mechanism, not the light. And what it measures is the gap between the two sounds: on a leaf shutter, and at slow speeds, that is the exposure time, but on a focal-plane shutter at fast speeds it is how long the curtains travel — a narrow slit crosses the film, and any one spot sees light for far less time. A measured 1/60 there can be a perfectly correct 1/1000. LAB AND ARCHIVE An overview sits at the top of the page: which film is in which camera, with the frame count and the day it was loaded, and where every roll in the archive stands — taken out, sent in, developed. Dates that are getting old are shown in red, so a roll that has been sitting somewhere for weeks catches your eye. Every roll you take out lands in the archive: which camera, what was on it, when and where it was developed, what it cost. Rolls sit on a timeline in the order things happened, each showing where it stands and the photos that are on it. Search by film, camera, lab or year — or by state: waiting, sent, developed. Export a single roll or a whole year as a PDF, with your notes and film strips. SHELF What is left in the fridge, by format. Loading a film into a camera counts it down by itself. ON THE CAMERA Meant for a phone clamped to the camera: turn it sideways and the meter puts the viewfinder on one side and the readings on the other, while the lab shows the list beside the roll you picked. Off by default, switched on in the settings — portrait stays the way the app works. NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER Filmlog Analog is designed as a data-minimising offline app. There is no user account, no registration and no server of our own. Everything you enter is stored solely on your device. One exception, and only when you ask for it: tapping "Time & place" on a note sends the coordinates to OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) to turn them into a place name. Nothing else is transmitted. YOUR BACKUP IS YOURS Nothing lives on a server of ours, so nobody here can restore your data for you. Two things stand between you and a lost phone. Android backs the app up into your Google account by itself, under "Back up app data" — that backup belongs to your Google account, not to us. And the app writes a backup file you keep, wherever you want it. Please do make one of those too: it is the only copy that is a snapshot of one particular day. A short manual sits in the settings: eight chapters, one per page, including the things that are easy to miss. Available in English, German, Japanese and Korean. The app works entirely offline.

Small phones: the header and tab bar take less room, and the light meter gives the viewfinder more space – about twice as much on the smallest phones. Light meter: a new switch in the settings hides the camera and shutter button on the light meter page, so the viewfinder gets the room.