How Rollbook works

The problem it solves

A roll of film is anonymous the moment it leaves the camera. The canister looks like every other canister, and whatever you knew about it — which camera, which lens, whether you pushed it — fades within a week. Rollbook keeps that knowledge attached to the roll from load to scan.

A roll is the unit

Everything in Rollbook is organised around one roll of film. You create the entry when you load the camera, not when you finish it, because that is the only moment you reliably know the film stock, the ISO you'll rate it at, and what body it went into. Each roll gets a short ID of its own, tying the physical canister in your drawer to the record on screen.

Status is the whole point

A roll moves through five states: unshot, shooting, exposed, developed, scanned. The state that matters most is exposed — shot but not yet developed. That's the pile that goes missing, gets shot twice, or sits at the lab for a month unnoticed. Filtering to exposed answers "what am I waiting on?" in one glance, and Rollbook counts how long each one has been waiting.

The QR label closes the loop

A record only helps if you can get to it while holding the roll. Print a label for the canister or the negative sleeve and the roll carries its own pointer: any phone camera opens its page. Optionally, photograph a printed code as the first frame — then the identity survives on the negative strip itself, even if the label peels off.

Privacy

Rolls are private by default. If you share one, the public page shows only neutral metadata — film stock, ISO, camera, date. Location, lab notes and personal notes never leave your account.

A typical week

Load a roll, log it, stick the label on the canister. Shoot it over however long it takes. When it's finished, mark it exposed and drop it in the drawer with the others. When you hand a batch to the lab, they're all already labelled and accounted for. When scans come back, mark them scanned and the record closes with everything you knew at the start still attached.

Presets and backups

If you shoot the same stock in the same camera repeatedly, save it as a preset so logging a roll takes seconds. Your library exports to CSV or JSON at any time — the data is yours and stays readable without Rollbook.

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