Film or digital

Every cataloged frame gets a FILM / DIGITAL tag. It drives a filter in the Archive, it sits in the TAGS section of the detail panel, and it follows a job when you put that job on the record.

It's also the tag most likely to be wrong on hybrid work. Worth understanding why, before you go looking for a setting that doesn't exist.

How the tag gets set

By looking at the photograph. That is the whole method.

We don't read it from EXIF and we don't ask you. During cataloging we hand the frame to Claude and ask whether it appears to be shot on film or digital, using grain, color rendering and tonality.

On plenty of frames that's enough. A scan with real grain and a soft highlight roll-off reads as film. A clean, sharp, high-contrast digital frame reads as digital.

Why it misses

Grain is the main tell, and grain is the first thing to go.

Every frame gets resized to 1568 pixels on the long edge before it reaches the model. That's Anthropic's recommended maximum, and what keeps a two hundred frame job affordable rather than expensive. It also flattens fine grain into something close to digital noise. The most reliable piece of evidence is the one we can't send at full strength.

Then there's what all of us do in post. Scans get cleaned up. Digital gets a film emulation and a grain overlay. If you shoot both in a day, the entire point of your edit is that the two look like one gallery. The tag is trying to undo work you did deliberately.

Fixing one frame

Open it in The Archive and look at the TAGS section of the detail panel. FILM / DIGITAL is a menu offering Film and Digital. Pick the right one. It saves when you pick it. The small info dot beside the label says the same thing this article does.

Fixing a hundred

This is the part that makes it a small problem rather than a real one. Four steps, and it takes about two minutes for a whole wedding.

1. Filter to the job. In The Archive, filter to the wedding, then add the Film / Digital chip and set it to whichever value is wrong.
2. Select the frames. Cmd click the first thumbnail. That puts the grid into select mode. Shift click takes everything between.
3. Press EDIT. The bottom toolbar appears as soon as one frame is selected. EDIT opens the Bulk Edit sheet, and it tells you how many images you're about to change.
4. Technical, then Film / Digital. Pick the field, then the value.

Film and Digital are the two canonical values we offer, and that's deliberate. A field with two possible values should never end up holding five. You'll also see any stray value already sitting in your data, and there's a free-text box below the chips, so it's possible to type something else in. Try not to.

Where the tag actually matters

Three places, and only two of them are worth your time.

The Archive filter. Film / Digital is one of the chips on the filter bar. That's how you pull every scan you've ever made in one click, which is the answer to a portfolio pass, a Substack post, or the question of whether you're shooting as much film as you think you're.

On the record. When you put a job on the record, we take the most common value across the frames you sent and record it as that wedding's format. So if two thirds of a hybrid wedding is tagged wrong, the wedding is filed wrong, not just the frames.

Nothing else. It doesn't change a single word we write. No caption says shot on film because of this tag. If it's wrong on one frame you're only going to post to Instagram, you can leave it and nothing downstream suffers.

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