Your scans stay in your folders. Each film becomes a roll, a project gathers frames across rolls, and nothing is copied.
Add your folder, make each film a roll, gather a project. Nothing is imported: your scans are read where they are.
Add your folder. Press ADD FOLDER… in the toolbar, or choose Open Folder… in the File menu (⌘O, or Ctrl+O on Windows).
Make each film a roll. Select its frames: the info column asks for a name and a film stock, then Make this folder a roll. Or choose Move into a New Roll… in the Rolls menu (⇧⌘G, or Ctrl+Shift+G on Windows): the frames move into a folder named after their first day.
Gather a project. Right-click frames from any roll and choose New Project from: it waits in the Projects tab, beside your Archive.
Your folders are the archive. Open Negative Initiative catalogues your film scans in the folders they already sit in: a roll is a folder, marked with its film, a project gathers frames across rolls, nothing is copied.
A roll keeps its film, a medal marks your keepers. And a drive you unplug loses nothing.
Your roll shows its film. Set its stock, shot date and camera once; the roll carries the stock's artwork in your archive.
Mark your keepers. Keys 0 to 3 set None, Bronze, Silver or Gold, and ⌘L filters your gallery by them.
Unplug a drive, lose nothing. Its frames stay in your archive, greyed, and Refresh (⌘R) reads your folders again.
Folders, rolls and your disk. The short answers first, then the detail.
Where they already are. Add a folder and every image in it and in its subfolders is in your archive; your originals are never written to, and your edits live in a small file beside each one.
Select the frames of one film, from one folder, and choose Move into a New Roll… in the Rolls menu (⇧⌘G). The app asks first, then makes a folder named after the day of the earliest capture, numbered if the name is taken, and moves the photos in with their sidecars; Undo puts them back. A folder you already have becomes a roll with Make a Roll, in its right-click menu.
Making a roll moves its photos into a new folder, and Undo puts them back; renaming a roll renames its folder. Move to ONI Trash never touches a file: it hides the photo, and Restore brings it back.
A photo sits in one project at a time: adding it to another moves it there, and the app asks first. A project left empty stays.
Nothing is lost. The folders of a drive that is away stay in your archive, their frames greyed. A folder leaves your archive only when its drive answers without it and you choose Remove from Library…, which touches no file.
Add the folder that holds your scans and they are catalogued where they are, in rolls and projects, each frame starting again from its scan. Your collections and keywords stay in Lightroom, and the .xmp files it keeps beside your RAWs move with them when a roll is made.
By its folder, its roll, its project and its medal: those are the structure, and a medal is the one mark a photo carries. Frames run in capture order, and ⌘L filters your gallery by medal.
See all sixteen conversions, real photographs converted in Open Negative Initiative, each with its raw scan.
From your scan to your export. One page per feature.
Add your folder, prepare the roll once, export. Free, and nothing else to install.
Snow night. Kodak Gold, converted in Open Negative Initiative.
Keep a film archive that lasts. Rolls, dates and sidecars, on your own disk: how to lay out your scans so that a roll is easy to find again, in the app and without it.
A film photographer shoots rolls, not days: a film is loaded, exposed, developed and scanned as one. A library that sorts scans by date scatters that object, and a roll shot over a week ends up spread across the days it was shot on.
A roll keeps it whole. Its frames share a film base, a development and a scanning session, which is why one measurement sets the colour of all of them, and why each roll is a folder of its own on your disk.
Digitise a whole roll with the same light, the same distance and the same exposure, set by hand on your camera or scanner. The frames then differ only by what is on the film. An automatic exposure reads each frame apart and evens out the very differences between a thin frame and a dense one that you want to keep.
The app reads how each scan was exposed in its EXIF, and measures a roll as one when its frames were captured alike.
| On the roll | What a scan knows | Where the roll's value comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Film Stock | Nothing: the film is printed on its edge, not in the file | Picked by hand, never guessed |
| Shot Date | Often the day the frame was digitised | Starts on the roll's first photo; set the day you shot |
| Camera Body | The camera or scanner that digitised the film | Typed by hand, never read off the scan's EXIF |
A scan knows when it was digitised, not which film it was, nor when and with what you shot it. Read the stock on the film's edge, where the maker prints its name, and set it once on the roll: Film Stock is picked by hand and never guessed.
Shot Date starts on the date of the roll's first photo, which for a scan is often the day it was digitised: set the day you shot. Camera Body is typed by hand and never read off a scan's EXIF, which names the scanner. All three go into the EXIF of your exports.
| In name order | Day first | Year first, as the app writes it |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 02-11-2025 | 2025-11-02 |
| 2nd | 14-03-2026 | 2026-01-20 |
| 3rd | 14-03-2026 2 | 2026-03-14 |
| 4th | 20-01-2026 | 2026-03-14 2 |
Move into a New Roll… names the roll's folder after the day of its earliest capture, written year, month, day, and numbers it when that name is taken. Names in that order sort by date in any file browser, on any system, with or without the app.
Rename a roll and its folder is renamed with it, so the name you give a roll is the one you find on your disk.
| File | What it holds | Written by the app |
|---|---|---|
frame.tif | Your scan, as you made it | Never: it is only read |
frame.tif.json | Your settings for that frame, in JSON you can read by hand | Yes, beside the scan |
Editing changes no pixel of a scan. Your settings are written to a small JSON file beside each original, named
after it in full, its sidecar: frame.tif keeps its edits in frame.tif.json. It reads by
hand, and it moves with the photo.
So a backup of your scan folder is a backup of your edits too: add the copy on another drive, and every frame comes back with its settings and its roll, which is read off each frame.
| File | What it is | Back it up? |
|---|---|---|
| Your scans | The originals, only ever read | Yes |
| Their sidecars | The one record of your edits | Yes, with your scans |
| The index | A cache, to lay out thousands of frames at once | No: delete it and it is rebuilt from the sidecars |
To lay out thousands of frames at once, the app keeps an index of your folders. It is only a cache: delete it and nothing is lost, since it is rebuilt from the sidecars, which stay the one record of your work.
| Beside your photo | What it is |
|---|---|
.json | The sidecar of Open Negative Initiative, moved first, so a photo never lands without its settings |
.xmp | Kept by Lightroom and other raw editors |
.pp3 | Kept by RawTherapee |
.dop | Kept by DxO |
.on1 | Kept by ON1 |
| The JPEG of a RAW+JPEG pair | Moves with its RAW |
| The red, green and blue passes | A frame scanned in three passes moves as its three files |
When a roll is made, each frame moves as one with what lies beside it: its own sidecar first, then the
.xmp that Lightroom and other raw editors keep, the .pp3 of RawTherapee, the
.dop of DxO and the .on1 of ON1. The JPEG of a RAW+JPEG pair moves with its RAW, and a
frame scanned in three passes, under red, green and blue light, moves as its three files together.
| Roll | Project | |
|---|---|---|
| On your disk | A folder of its own | No folder: each frame stays in its roll's |
| Holds | The frames of one film | Frames from any roll |
| A frame sits in | One roll | One project at a time |
| Where you find it | The Archive tab | The Projects tab |
Building a series, an exhibition or a book means looking at frames from many rolls side by side, and choosing. A project lays them together in the Projects tab while each frame stays in its roll's folder; a photo sits in one project at a time, so each frame belongs to one series.
In your gallery and in each roll, frames run in the order they were captured. ⌘− and ⌘+ switch between twelve frames to a row, to sort a roll, and six, to look at it.