Shooting film means shooting blind. You load a roll, expose it over days or weeks, and by the time it comes back from the lab you have forgotten half of what you pointed the camera at. Which stock was this? What did I rate it at? Was this the one I pushed two stops? The information exists only in your head, and heads leak. Rollbook is where it goes instead.
What a roll record holds
Every roll gets a record with an auto-incrementing ID like RB-0001. It stores the film stock and the ISO you actually rated it at, the format, the camera and lens, start and end dates, location, frames shot, and the whole development side: push/pull, developer, lab, lab status, scan resolution, where it ended up archived, and free notes. The app knows real film when it sees it — type in Tri-X or Portra or Velvia and it infers black-and-white, colour, or slide on its own.
It ships with thirteen built-in film stocks and seven development recipes — HP5 at 1600 in DD-X, Tri-X in HC-110, and so on — so the common cases are one tap, and your own presets sit alongside them.
A timeline, not just a form
A roll isn't a static row. Rollbook derives a chronological story for each one, merging the automatic lifecycle events — loaded, shot, developed, scanned, archived — with manual "moments" you add yourself. The roll moves through real statuses as you go, from unshot all the way to archived.
The camera captures the image. Rollbook captures everything the image can't tell you later.
Off the screen and onto the film
The archive is only useful if it survives contact with the physical negatives. So Rollbook prints — four label formats, sized in millimetres with an SVG QR code: a Frame 0 card to shoot as the first frame, a canister label, a sleeve strip, and an envelope label. Scan that QR later with the built-in camera scanner and it takes you straight back to the roll. If a roll is shared, the QR points at its public page instead.
Yours, and shareable on your terms
Each roll can stay private, go unlisted, or be shared at a public URL under /r/ — and you choose exactly which fields a visitor sees. The public pages are read-only and server-guarded; a shared roll never leaks the fields you didn't whitelist. Under the hood it's a React app backed by Supabase, with sign-in by email magic link and per-user isolation enforced in the database. Your data exports to CSV or a full JSON backup whenever you want it, and rolls you started offline migrate up into an account cleanly.
It lives at rollbook.bystanek.com, and it started, like most of my tools, from a frustration I got tired of having.