Receiving Your Film Photos: It Just Got Better

We've been working hard over the summer on improving our custom-build lab software 💪🏼 While it still isn't perfect (who is?!) I wanted to share the biggest things that are making lives easier for film photographers like you.

What is this software?

Let's go back to the beginning of Analogue Wonderland's lab 🔬 We wanted to build a modern film developing lab: one that used all the best traditional physical processes to bring your images to life, but using technological improvements and digital upgrades wherever possible to make the experience easy and stress-free.

Some of those things were fast and tangible: working with our couriers to offer free and tracked postage for photographers to send in their films worry-free.

But the biggest thing we took on was the experience of receiving your scans and ordering prints. The most common route for labs around the world to manage this part is: (1) ask customers to choose whether they want prints before the photos have even been developed, then (2) send scans via WeTransfer, DropBox or Google Drive. The problem with (1) is that you have to decide before you'd even seen whether all your images were print-worthy, which leads to waste and disappointment. It's not a great feeling to throw away 20 photos to keep the best 16 - no matter how amazing those 16 are.

Is it art? 🤔 Or is it just a waste of paper and ink 😂

And the problems with (2) are different by platform and recipient, but ultimately comes down to the challenges of trusting a third party platform with private and sensitive images at scale. Those platforms are great for a small number of orders, but the capacity for issues with data and privacy grows exponentially with the size of the community. They also struggle on mobile, with iPhones of the time unable to preview files in ZIP.

Our solution was to dream big: build a piece of software that would be hosted on private AW-controlled servers, could manage the complexity of different accounts and private data with thousands of customers integrated directly into the website, allow you to instantly see your images through your mobile phone (and download individual frames) AND would let folks see their photos *before* placing an order for prints.

We believed this would lead to more prints of the best film photography - and so it has proven 😊

The beginning

It turns out that building software is difficult...

No I'm joking 🙃 we obviously knew that going in. But knowing something is not the same as experiencing it!

It took a few more months than planned to get the program live, and at the start it didn't have the capability for folks to order prints as we prioritised the security and the integration into customer accounts.

After half a year we were confident enough to add the photo print functionality (read: The Modern Film Lab) and we were ready to roll it out to the entire community.

Since then we've been keeping track of every feature request and bug report so that we could plan a pipeline of continual upgrades and improvements. And recently quite a few have gone live!

What's been improved

There are a few very specific improvements that you'll notice when you order film developing through our lab.

1) Orders are split into folders according to the rolls of film within the order

2) Folders display the status of each film (with colour-coding for fast checking!)

You can see both (1) and (2) in this screenshot. Each film within the order is split out, and you can see that three films have been received, developed and the images are ready. And I still need to send in one B&W 35mm and one Colour 35mm to complete this order! Incidentally if the roll has been received by the lab but not yet processed that also comes up - in orange

3) The image resolution is automatically displayed under every photo (pink in below)

4) Adding notes to folders and images so that you can quickly see the Film Stock that you used, and the twincheck we used in the lab for a full paper-trail of your negative (green in the above where I'd used Kodak Tri-X and visible in folder view below)

5) Fixed 99% of the log-in issues where you might have been sent into a never-ending loop of writing your email and password

I don't have an image for this one - hopefully it's just one that you notice because it's NOT there any more!

What's next?

We are never content to leave things as they are, so there are still many elements of the software on our 'improve or fix' list. Some of the biggest ones - in no particular order - are:

• Speed up the loading times as you navigate your folders. Tricky to do as you might have some large files in there (I'm looking at you TIFFs!) but we think there are definitely some thing we can implement
• Improve the navigation when you're moving between images within a roll (especially on mobile)
• Add breadcrumbs so that you can quickly move between different films and orders within your account
• Fix the remaining 1% of log-in issues

Do you have anything else you want us to add to this list?