Unspool

An image tagging tool for the Macintosh by Jonathan Rothwell.

Still under development!

A screenshot of a Mac app called “Unspool”, showing a two-pane sidebar-detail layout in a document called “Portra 160 blossom”. In the sidebar are images, with their filenames, and dates and locations, along with an “Overview” option, and controls for sorting the images (which are of a balcony in Hackney at night and various trees in blossom.) In the detail pane, the image is shown with a white border suggesting a print, alongside controls allowing the app’s user to set the capture time and the location (by searching, or by setting latitude, longitude, and altitude) along with an image description. On the toolbar are buttons to mark an image as a dud, delete an image, export, and a gauge indicating how many of the photos have locations and times attached.

What Unspool does

Its job is to help you to tag your scanned film photographs (from a lab or from your own scanner) with metadata. This will mean that when the time comes to ingest into iCloud Photo Library (or the other image organisation tool/service of your choice) you have less work to do to organise them. Unspool allows you to:

A screenshot of a Mac app called “Unspool”, showing a two-pane sidebar-detail layout in a document called “Portra 160 blossom”. In the sidebar are images, with their filenames, and dates and locations, along with an “Overview” option, and controls for sorting the images (which are of a balcony in Hackney at night and various trees in blossom.) In the detail pane, the image is shown with a white border suggesting a print, alongside controls allowing the app’s user to set the capture time and the location (by searching, or by setting latitude, longitude, and altitude) along with an image description. On the toolbar are buttons to mark an image as a dud, delete an image, export, and a gauge indicating how many of the photos have locations and times attached.

I want it!

Unspool is not ready to use yet. When it is ready, there will probably be a public beta.

In the meantime, if you want a powerful tool that can read and overwrite metadata on various image files, I can strongly recommend ExifTool by Phil Harvey.

In the meantime, you can…