Tracking rolls through develop and scan

Most logbooks stop working the moment you rewind a roll. That's the gap Film Logbook 2.0 fills with the Develop and Scan phases — the weeks between the last frame and the scanned files, where a roll is physically out of your hands but the metadata still has things to do.

Here's the rhythm.

Closing out Shooting

When you fire the last frame, move the roll from Shooting to Develop in the roll menu. Do it before you put the camera down. Three things happen:

The roll stops showing up in the "active rolls" view, which is how the app knows not to surface it next time you reach for a camera.
A timestamp is stamped on the transition — the date you finished shooting. Useful months later when you're trying to remember when a roll was shot, not just what's on it.
The roll surfaces a Develop-phase checklist the next time you open it.

If you forget to move the roll right away, it's fine — do it when you remember. The shooting end-date will be slightly off; log what you know.

What to write down at drop-off

Whether you're dropping at a lab or loading a tank yourself, this is the moment to capture the details you'll want later:

Lab or developer. Name of the lab if you're sending it out, or the chemistry if you're self-developing (Rodinal 1+50, Xtol stock, etc.).
Date dropped / date developed. The Develop phase shows this on the roll view.
Push or pull. If the roll is going to +1, +2, −1, etc., the lab needs to know and so does future-you. Put the stop adjustment in the roll notes with the word "push" or "pull" in it — searchable later.
Any special instructions. "Scan as negative, no colour correction." "Do not cut." "Return negatives in sleeves, not rolls." Labs vary; your instructions vary; log them.

Keep it to 15 seconds of typing. You're not writing a letter to the lab; you're leaving a note for yourself.

While you wait

The Develop state looks different from Shooting. The frame grid collapses to a summary; the lab info you entered sits at the top. If you're running multiple rolls through the same lab at the same time, they'll all be in Develop — you can scan the list and see what's out.

This is also where the tracking value shows up. Scroll back six months and you can see: this roll spent 23 days in Develop because you shipped it and the lab was slow. That's useful feedback for which lab to use next time.

When the scans arrive

Move the roll to Scan. The app doesn't know they've arrived — you tell it. At this stage you'll import the scans, one of two ways:

Whole roll, if the lab returns one scan per frame in a zip. Drop the folder and the app matches frames by filename (it expects names that include the frame number somewhere — IMG_2034_03.jpg for frame 3, etc.).
One at a time, if you're scanning yourself or the lab returned a mishmash. Tap a frame, attach the scan, move on.

Take a minute here. This is the step people rush through and regret.

The reference-shot swap

If you captured phone reference shots while shooting, they're still attached to the frames. When a real scan comes in for that frame, the reference moves to a secondary slot — it's not thrown away. You keep both.

That's intentional. The reference shot is what you saw. The scan is what the lab saw. Having both visible side-by-side is how you learn what your scanner or lab is doing to your images — you'll notice a systematic cool shift, or that a particular lab clips your highlights. Colour-grading your own scans over time becomes a learnable skill when you have this record.

Archiving

Once every frame has a scan and the roll feels "done," move it to Archive. The roll becomes read-only in terms of its phase; you can still edit any field, but you can't go back to Shooting without deliberately choosing to.

Archive isn't a black hole. The archive view is searchable: by film stock, camera, tag, location, date range, or free-text note. A well-logged roll is findable years later.

The meta-rule

The only phase that really needs discipline is Shooting — that's where the metadata actually gets created. Everything that happens after is mechanical: update a status, attach scans, move to the next state. If you get shooting-time logging right, the rest is just housekeeping, and the app does most of the housekeeping for you.