![A screenshot of a Mac app called “Unspool”, showing a two-pane sidebar-detail layout in a document called “2 July CineStill 800T”. 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 cyclists at dawn and a pickup truck in the morning light.) 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, a toggle to show/hide the inspector, and a gauge indicating how many of the photos have locations and times attached.](/unspool-detail-screenshot-light_hu6f310338fb2130dea14b86195838b55f_2545263_4096x0_resize_q75_h2_box_2.webp)
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:
- Specify information about the film (its box speed, and, if you over- or under-exposed the film, an exposure variation value in third-stops)
- Specify information about the camera (which you can save for next time)
- Specify additional metadata, such as a copyright holder, an image description, or a memo
- Detect the frame numbers in your photo file names (e.g. determine that
0405000000000000023.jpg
is frame 23), and organise them by that frame number (ascending or descending order, or manually) - View an overview of all your photos from a single roll or pack
- Mark unwanted images as ‘duds’ that you can ignore when exporting
- Export to the file system
What’s Still Coming
Before I let other people use it in beta, Unspool will need:
- Export to the Photos app
- A confidence check to be sure the timeline is in the right order before you export
- Ability to rotate images
- And a ton of bug fixes & polish
![A screenshot of a Mac app called “Unspool”, showing a two-pane sidebar-detail layout in a document called “2 July CineStill 800T”. In the sidebar are images, with their filenames, and dates and locations, along with an “Overview” option. In the main view is a form allowing people to pick the camera, film, artist copyright and sort order of the images, plus a grid view (titled 'contact sheet') below.](/unspool-overview-screenshot-light_hu6f310338fb2130dea14b86195838b55f_1843105_4096x0_resize_q75_h2_box_2.webp)
I want it!
Unspool is not ready to use yet. When it is ready to play with, there will be a beta period: you can express interest in the Unspool beta here.
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…
- Read the dev blog I will be writing on joro.dev. There will be a new post at least every few months.
- Look at
VersionedCodable
, a part of Unspool’s document handling code which I have made open-source. - Follow the Unspool account on the fediverse @unspool@indieapps.space
- Chat with me on Mastodon @joro@tech.lgbt.