A year ago Bellamy ran a piece on Frames here, and a lot has happened since. If you came to the app through that post, first of all: thank you. That single article brought in a wave of photographers who’ve shaped the app more than they probably realise. This is a check-in on what’s happened since, and on something I didn’t expect when I started: how much of Frames now belongs to the people using it.
Where this actually started
Frames didn’t begin in 2025. It began four years ago, under a different name (Datafilm) as a small note-taking app for film photographers. No metadata writing, no Mac companion, no library to speak of. Just a way to jot down what you shot, frame by frame, instead of trying to remember it later or scribbling in a notebook that would inevitably get lost. It did one thing.
What it didn’t do was close the loop. You logged the data, and then the data sat there. Your scans didn’t know any of it. That gap nagged at me for years. The version I rebuilt and renamed last May was the answer to it: log on iPhone as you shoot, drop your scans into the Mac app, pair them up, and the aperture, shutter, lens, location, film stock, and more get written into the files themselves. Lightroom, Capture One, Apple Photos, Darktable, they all read it natively, the way they should.
That rebuild is what Bellamy covered last year. And right after it shipped, I quit everything else and went full time.
A year, on my own
I’ll be straight with you: full time on Frames isn’t a comfortable living yet. It’s growing, the way these things grow when one person is doing all of it, but slowly. What’s kept me at it isn’t the numbers. It’s the emails from photographers telling me the app has changed how they shoot, that they’re more deliberate, and that Frames has filled a gap they didn’t quite know how to close: the one between the analog side of the work and the digital files that follow. Most people aren’t printing every roll anymore. The scans are where the photos live, and having the shooting data live in those files alongside them turns out to matter more than I realised when I started. That’s a strange and specific kind of fuel.
A bit of context on how I got here. I spent years as a UX and UI designer before going full time on Frames, and a lot of what I care about as a designer ends up in the app, sometimes to a fault. Every screen, every animation, every default has been sat with and second-guessed and rebuilt at least once. I know there’s a lot of software being shipped quickly right now, generated in a weekend with a bit of AI help, and I understand the appeal. My own approach is just slower. I’d rather take the long way around and end up with something that feels considered, even if it means fewer features per release.
The other thing keeping me at it is that the app has stopped feeling entirely mine, and that’s been the best part of this year.
How most of this got built
Here’s how a typical change happens. Someone writes in, often apologetically, to describe a small friction. They assume it’s just them. Half the time it isn’t, and even when it is, the someone turns out to be exactly the kind of photographer I want Frames to serve.
A few from this year, picked because they’re representative:
The frame counter used to cap at 40. A handful of Pentax 17 owners pointed out that this locked half-frame shooters out of half their roll. Reasonable. The counter now goes high enough for any half-frame body.
The aperture picker used to go up to f/22. Then I started hearing from medium and large format shooters whose lenses go to f/32, f/45, f/64, and beyond. The picker now goes to f/128. It covers every lens I’ve heard of, and probably a few I haven’t.
A Nikon F3 user noticed some shutter speed values were missing. That one sent me back to rewrite the shutter input properly rather than patch it.
SLR shooters wanted PASM tracking. People shooting hyperfocal wanted focus distance. Filter users wanted filters. Metering mode came up often enough that it’s in there now.
Photographers organising their library by camera, then year, then city, then project told me one level of folders wasn’t enough. You can now nest five deep, and rolls and folders move freely.
None of these were on my roadmap a year ago. I read every email and reply to most within a day or two, and the changelog this year reads like a transcript of those conversations.
Making it fit your workflow, not mine
One thing became clear over the year: no two people log a roll the same way. So a lot of this year’s work has been about stepping back and letting you shape the app around how you actually shoot.
The recording toolbar is the clearest example. It displays the shortcuts you use to set the main values for each frame, and it has six slots. Four are fixed: frame number, shutter speed, aperture, and a “more” button that reveals every other field. The other two are yours to choose: program mode (PASM), flash, exposure compensation, subject distance, lens, focal length for zoom lenses, metering mode, or a free-form notes field. Pick the two you reach for most. If you’d rather not work from a toolbar at all, you can switch to a full-screen form view, which some people find quicker once they’ve got into a rhythm.
The library is similarly flexible. Film rolls can be shown as a list or a gallery, whichever suits how you remember your work. Inside a roll, you can keep the frame list minimal or have each row show lens, date and time, and location, so you see what you need without opening every frame. The point is that the same app can feel quite different to two photographers, and that’s deliberate.
On the Mac side
The biggest change is the one I heard about most: metadata reintegration now writes into TIFF, DNG and JXL alongside JPEG. No re-encoding. The pixels don’t move; only the metadata changes. If you scan to DNG or TIFF, and most of you do, this was the request. It took longer than I wanted, but it’s there.
Export performance on big DNG files (the 100MB+ ones) is much better. The information sidebar shows roughly twice the detail and has been redrawn for readability. The whole app can be driven from the keyboard now: pair, unpair, export, no mouse needed.
The other Mac change worth flagging is a short onboarding tour. A few people told me they felt slightly lost on their first run, which made sense once I sat with it. Pairing images with metadata is a fairly unusual idea, and a clean interface can still use a nudge the first time through. So when you import a .frames file for the first time, a short guided tour points out the four things worth knowing: how to pair images (double-click a single frame, or drag several in at once to fill consecutive frames), how to switch between list, grid and gallery views, how the sidebar moves you between global info, location, notes and paired image info, and where the export button lives. It’s quick and doesn’t get in the way. I’m not generally a fan of onboardings, because a well-designed interface following familiar patterns shouldn’t need one, but people come to this app from very different backgrounds and I’d rather everyone feel at home in it.
On pricing
A few changes here, all in the same direction. I want Frames to be affordable for as many photographers as possible, so I’ve tried to make the pricing as fair as I can without making the project unsustainable.
The iOS and Mac apps used to be sold separately. They’re now a single purchase. Existing users didn’t have to do anything. They were always meant to be one tool, and pricing them as two was a mistake I’m glad to have undone.
The trial covers five rolls and almost every feature, which is enough to know whether the app fits your workflow. After that, around $2 unlocks everything for a month, including EXIF reintegration on the Mac side, which is the part most people want to try before committing. A full year costs roughly the same as a roll of Portra 400 (or Ektacolor Pro, if Kodak’s rebrand has caught up with you yet).
And for anyone who’d rather not deal with a subscription at all, Frames is available as a one-time purchase too. A lot of people wrote in to say they preferred to buy software once and own it, and that’s a fair position to hold. Both options exist. Pick whichever fits how you think about software.
On the iPhone
The bones are the same, almost everything on top has been redone. New toolbar, new haptics, animations I hope feel intentional rather than the kind of motion you put up with.
Exports picked up GPX (if you geotag elsewhere), print-ready PDFs, and XMP sidecars, alongside the existing CSV, TXT and .frames files. Search works on roll title, camera, film stock and folder, which starts to matter once you have dozens of entries and you’re hunting for the weird one from a trip last spring.
If you’re on iOS 26, the app has been redesigned around the new Liquid Glass interface. iOS 18 users get the same features; iOS 26 users get a bit more polish on top.
The app is also in more languages than it was a year ago. Film is a global thing. The app should get out of the way.
What’s next
There’s a thing that happens when you build software alone for long enough. You stop having opinions about what the app should be, and you start listening for what it’s already trying to become. Most of what’s in this year’s changelog came from that kind of listening.
The next year will probably look the same. Large format is the obvious one. The whole library is built around the idea of a roll, and a sheet isn’t a roll, so the concepts need pulling apart and the UX rethought around them. Beyond that, it’s mostly the small stuff: the friction that only shows up after months of use, the rough corners that nobody notices on day one. Android and Windows are at the back of my head, but I’d rather get the current apps right than spread thin to plant a flag.
If you shoot film and you’ve never used Frames, give the trial a try and see if it fits. If you’ve been using it since the Datafilm days, thank you for sticking with it through the rebuild. And if there’s a friction in your workflow you’ve been quietly working around, write in. That’s how most of the last twelve months happened.
And Bellamy, thank you. Twice now you’ve put this project in front of the right people. I don’t take that lightly.
Download Frames: Film Photography Log (for iPhone)
Download Frames: Film Photography EXIF (for Mac)
Visit the Frames: Film Photography App website
It is really awesome to see how this has developed as a project into a full time job for Vincent. Make sure you try the app out and share your feedback.
JCH