Scanned film, sorted and mapped like everything else.

Anchorframe is a Mac app that reconstructs accurate date, location, camera, lens, and film stock metadata for scanned film photos, using nearby iPhone photos as time and location anchors — so scanned frames sort and map correctly alongside photos that had that data at capture.

How it works

You point Anchorframe at a folder of scans. It reads the frames and their existing metadata, and shows you candidate anchors from your photo library: pictures taken on the same trip, the same day, the same roll. You confirm the match, and the date and place are written back into the scan files themselves.

Your files are the database. There is no separate catalog to keep in sync, and nothing to migrate if you stop using the app.

Camera, lens, and film stock

A scanner writes its own name into a file's EXIF, not the camera's, so the gear a roll was shot on is one more thing the scan does not know. Anchorframe's camera, lens, and film fields suggest names as you type, out of an open index of film equipment — bodies, lenses, film stocks, and the lens mounts that say which of the first two fit each other.

That index is published here, browsable, with every entry linking the source it was read from. It is maintained in a separate public repository under CC BY-SA 4.0, which means a wrong name is a pull request rather than a support ticket, and the data is useful to anything that needs to know what a camera is called — not only to this app.

Camera and lens are also written to the standard tiff:Model and exif:LensModel tags, so other photo apps display them. Film stock has no standard tag anywhere, so it is written in Anchorframe's own namespace and, for now, only Anchorframe reads it back.

Where your data goes

Nowhere. Anchorframe runs in Apple's App Sandbox with no network entitlement, which means the operating system will not let it open a network connection at all — not to us, not to anyone. There is no account, no analytics, and no server.

The privacy policy is specific about the one exception, which is macOS itself looking up a place name for a coordinate you chose.

Getting it

Anchorframe is in development. If you have a question in the meantime, the support page has a working address.