Crown + Flint Companion App for Film Photographers Receives Major Update

Late this summer, film photographer Don Goodman-Wilson launched Crown + Flint, a smartphone app designed to be an analog photographers’ digital companion. Goodman-Wilson announced the app’s first major update, adding numerous requested features.

In Crown + Flint Release 2 (R2), available now on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, there is a massive rewriting of the app’s base code which improves reliability and sets the stage for future releases.

There are also numerous new features in the app now, including faster and more valuable auto-suggestions for equipment and film manufacturers. The app also has a revised frame skip feature, the ability to enter fractional film speeds (“You’re welcome, you freaky-deeky low-speed film lover, you,” writes Goodman-Wilson), an option to add a dedicated X-sync setting to user data for particular cameras, the ability to edit the camera and lens used to capture a photo, and a few other minor tweaks.

One of the most significant benefits of Crown + Flint R2 is that it provides the framework necessary for future major releases, including Release Three, Four, and Five, all of which are detailed in a new roadmap.

R3, dubbed “cold storage,” will allow users to keep much better track of their inventory of unexposed film rolls and boxes of sheet film, ensuring photographers know precisely what they have on hand and how long it has been in storage.

R4, “homecoming,” will put Crown + Flint on a smartphone’s home screen and lock screen, enabling users to add a new shot to their catalog quickly.

Rounding out the current roadmap is release five, “Filtered Reality,” which will add “first-class support for using filters during your shoot and managing your filter collection.”

Alongside the new update and development roadmap, Crown + Flint has announced the Open Film Database, “an open source, comprehensive, and definitive source of all data available for the widest possible range of still photography film stocks, whether in production or out of production.”

The Crown + Flint team has seeded the database with everything they already know but admits there is still much work to be done. The team invites anyone to help fill in the gaps and contribute their knowledge to the open-source film database. The team hopes that the data will prove useful to analog photographers, whether they use Crown + Flint or not. The current data is available on GitLab and there is a Discord group for the open-source data.

Image credits: Crown + Flint