“2024 Film Wrapped”: See your film usage stats with the Film Log app!
This year, I shot 86 rolls of film, and my most active month for archiving it was November. But my most active month of all time was December last year: 17 rolls. How about you?
If you’d like to see a graph like that rendering *your stats*, check out Film Log: analog.cafe/app/film-log
Film Log is a free web app that helps you track film across your cameras and throughout its lifecycle — from packaging to the archive. See the overview of Film Log on 35mmc: 35mmc.com/07/05/2022/film-…
I’ve just added a card to the app that shows the number of rolls archived every month and a summary of total usage. You would need to have used the app to see your stats.
If you aren’t using Film Log to track your film, this may be a good time to start!
Most of the articles on this blog take hours, days, or weeks to create. But the news of a new film, a new camera, or something else happens much faster than that.
This is why I started sharing time-sensitive write-ups and shorter pieces as comments (rather than full articles) and tagged them as #editorial🔥.
Editorial comments are part of this blog’s RSS feed, and I also share them on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads to inform the community. But until today, they were off to the side of the main blog content if you visited the website.
This new update (v3.25.76) adds the top three newest Editorial pieces at the top of the News page (analog.cafe/news). You can now get a glance at what’s new in the world of film photography just by visiting that page.
I try not to bother readers who come here for film photography-related stuff with software updates. This one, however, took days to get just right (animation, data transforms, layout) — which is why I wanted to flaunt it a little.
Better support for international readers on Analog.Cafe.
Even though I mostly read, write, and speak English here, film photographers are an international community. This blog was developed and first published out of Chiang Mai (Thailand), a small city with perhaps the most labs per capita in the world (see analog.cafe/r/where-to-dev…). I also get comments and emails in other languages, which is easy as translation tools are pretty good these days.
But because I still live in my anglophone bubble, some international readers (about 1% of you) have had a bad experience on this blog. It blew up with an error message suddenly and unexpectely, simply because of a translation plugin.
The issue is finally fixed. It was a challenging bug to track down and rectify (if you’re technical, you may find this github.com/vercel/next.js/… and this martijnhols.nl/gists/every… helpful). And it would’ve never gotten fixed if no one had told me it was happening (since I don’t use translation tools for English pages).
So thank you all for giving me feedback and reporting bugs over the years!
Please let me know if you ever have issues on this blog, would like to chat about film, or would like to submit an article of your own — nearly half of the submissions I publish here are written by non-native English speakers!
This week, I spent some time improving the “guts” of the Analog.Cafe website. One (small) update I’m particularly proud of is the GOLD member’s homepage, which now features the list of my best picks for Analog.Cafe articles, apps, and features.
You can also sort the list by “All,” which will show you all of my recommendations AND the exclusive content; “Exclusives,” which will show you all the special articles and apps only members have access to; and “Announcements,” which will show you the monthly member letters.
If you’d like to take full advantage of this new design and support Analog.Cafe (and aren’t yet a member), consider subscribing at analog.cafe/gold/get — the memberships are now on sale!
Your first two months are FREE. This month, I am also giving away a camera and a bunch of film to all members (including new members).
New search tools and recommendations live on Analog.Cafe!
This blog hosts over 630 long-form articles and thousands of notes like this one. Some are reviews, others are essays, guides, apps, community, or editorials. You could always use the search function on Analog.Cafe (analog.cafe/search), but it wasn’t custom-built for this blog — it’s a Google bolt-on service that works OK, but it can’t distinguish various types of content, and it would often surface unhelpful pages.
This weekend, I built a new search engine and a recommendation tool that should help you get more out of this website:
You can now refine your article searches by limiting your results to specific sections (film, cameras, guides, books, apps, essays, etc.) and perform separate comment and long-form article searches.
You can also like & reply to comments right in the search results.
This new search engine also now powers relevant recommendations below each article and comments like this one.
I hope these new tools help you find the right stuff and discover new reads about your favourite films and film cameras. Let me know if you see any bugs or have ideas on how to improve things.
I’m also curious if you find updates like this one helpful. Do you?
In this month’s “Anniversary Edition” letter to the blog supporters (analog.cafe/r/anniversary-…), I highlighted the fact that Analog.Cafe has been ad-free for the past seven years.
This is possible thanks to the Analog.Cafe GOLD members (a $5/mo subscription with special perks).
Analog.Cafe also earns money from affiliate referrals, which typically lead to eBay, Amazon, and others. This is a common practice online; however, Amazon doesn’t always have the best prices on film, and film cameras on eBay can become a risky purchase (see analog.cafe/r/the-vintage-…). Which is why I’m happy to replace some of those links with the ones from Polaroid and Freestyle Photo.
Polaroid.com is the best place to buy film and cameras made by the company. They often stock items that aren’t sold anywhere else and usually have prices that are as good or better than the competition.
Freestyle Photo specializes in all things analog, including film, paper, chemistry, and darkroom equipment. They are the largest distributor in North America.
Here are some products I reviewed that are sold at Freestyle:
This release fixes an issue that crashed the web app for GOLD subscribers when visiting pages with tables of contents. Thank you, Liam and David, for reporting the issue, and sorry for the trouble!
I will be adding automated tests to make sure this particular problem doesn’t occur in the future.
The last 13 #website updates were focused on content and messaging around GOLD memberships. I’ve also added links to contact me in more places so it’s easier to get help in case something isn’t working.
Meanwhile, many small changes to numerous articles are being pushed this week. Some of them are typo corrections and updated links. But most notable are the new tables of contents blocks.
I’ve seen Google digest my tables of contents and display parts of them in the results. I’ve also noticed that TOC links are getting used by the readers. I’m happy that many of you find them helpful.
I am working on adding more TOCs but the process is manual so it’ll take time to complete.
Hi Analog.Cafe readers! I’ve just shipped an update to the website, which should improve your reading and navigation. Here’s what’s new in version `3.21.1`:
• Serif title fonts (for legibility),
• Tables of contents in long articles,
• Better contrast in the dark mode,
• “Scroll up” buttons next to article headers,
• Optimized HTML (for faster page loads),
• And a “Refresh” button on the homepage.
I’ve been updating this website’s design and the digital “guts” every couple of months (or days) since 2017. Since web design isn’t typically part of a conversation when talking about film cameras, I usually kept those updates behind the curtain.
However, web design is a big part of how we communicate, so I’d like to try sharing this journey of blog-building with you under the #website tag.
If you’re having any issues using this website or have suggestions, I’d love to hear them! You can share them publically by adding #website to your comment here or privately via email: analog.cafe/about#contact
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