How to catalog
a film camera collection.

Why catalog old cameras at all?

One camera, you carry in your head. The trouble starts around the fifth or sixth, when the shelf fills with bodies that all need something different to stay alive. Film gear isn't like a phone you replace. A 1970s rangefinder is forty or fifty years old, every example has its own quirks, and the knowledge of how to keep it shooting lives nowhere but in your memory — until it doesn't.

• When did this last get a CLA? Clean, lube, adjust. An old leaf shutter gums up, the slow speeds drag, the rangefinder patch fades. If you can't say when a body was last serviced, you find out mid-roll, with the frames already gone.
• Have the light seals gone? The foam around the back door turns to black goo on a schedule of its own. On older SLRs and compacts, the seals are dead long before the camera is. You want to know which bodies are due before you load them, not after the leaks show up on the negatives.
• What battery does it actually take? Half of these were built for 1.35V mercury cells that are now gone. Does this meter need a modern zinc-air cell, a voltage adapter, or a silver-oxide battery with compensation? The answer is different for every body, and it's never written on the camera.
• Which ones haven't been exercised? A shutter that sits for a year sticks. Most collections have a quiet half that never gets a roll through them. Worth knowing before they seize.

A catalog answers these in a few seconds instead of a few drawers and a forum search. That's the whole case for keeping one.

What to record for each body.

You don't need all of this on day one. Start with what's on the shelf and let the rest fill in as you shoot. Over time, a good entry holds the things film gear quietly demands:

• The identity. Make, model, format (35mm, 120, 110, half-frame, large format sheet), and the serial. On older bodies the serial dates the camera and tells you which production run — sometimes different internals than a later one of the same name.
• The mount and what fits it. Screw mounts, SLR bayonets, rangefinder mounts, and the proprietary bayonet on a fixed-lens compact. The mount decides which of your lenses this body can even use, and it's the first thing you forget across a dozen cameras.
• The meter and its battery. Whether it has a working meter at all, what cell it wants, and whether you're compensating for a modern voltage. The single most useful note for actually loading a roll.
• Service and condition. Last CLA date and who did it. Light seal replacement date. Whether the slow speeds are accurate, the foam is fresh, the rangefinder is aligned, the selenium meter still reads. The running condition log is the heart of a film catalog.
• What you paid, and the haul. Purchase date, price, and where it came from — the estate sale, the camera show, the auction listing. Whether it arrived with a case, the right cap, the original strap.
• The photos. The body, the top plate, any ding or brassing, the receipt. A clear shot of the actual condition is worth more than any adjective when you sell or insure it later.

That service log is the part people wish they'd kept. Two years on, "did I ever replace the seals on that old SLR?" is a question only a written record can answer — and the negatives are the ones that pay for guessing wrong.

Spreadsheet, film logbook, or dedicated app?

There's no single right answer for film gear, so here's the honest version of each.

A spreadsheet is free, it's yours, and it does exactly what you tell it. Plenty of careful collectors run a sheet for decades and never want for more. The cost is friction: you build every column by hand, the photos of each body live in some other folder, and updating "replaced light seals today" on your phone at the workbench is a small ordeal. If you already love spreadsheets, you're set. If you don't, you'll start one, add six cameras, and never open it again.

A film logbook is the closest thing to a purpose-built answer. The better ones catalog cameras, lenses, and accessories, and some go further: every roll, every frame, which body and lens shot which exposure, sometimes backed by a shared camera database. If meticulous per-frame logging is the hobby for you, that may fit better than anything here. The trade is that many are account-based services with your collection synced to a server, and the frame-by-frame depth is more than some collectors want — they just need to know what they own and what each body needs next.

A general photography-gear app is usually built around digital bodies and metadata. It'll happily list a film camera, but it has no real home for the things that matter here — seal dates, mercury-battery substitutes, CLA history. You end up cramming film-specific facts into a "notes" box anyway.

A simple dedicated catalog saves you the setup without asking you to log every frame. The fields are there, photos attach to the entry, it's built for a phone, and you decide how much to record. The question worth asking is the same one every account-based logbook raises: where does the list actually live, and who else can reach it?

Where a spreadsheet falls short.

A spreadsheet is genuinely fine for the facts. It falls down on the two things a film collection needs most. First, the photos — a row in a sheet can't really hold a picture of the brassing on a black-paint body or a snapshot of the seal foam you're deciding whether to replace, and those images are exactly what you reach for at a sale or a claim. Second, the moment of use: when you're at a flea table deciding whether you already own this exact compact rangefinder, or at the bench updating a CLA date, a spreadsheet on a phone is the wrong tool at the wrong time. The record you don't update is the record you stop trusting.

Why some collectors keep the list off the cloud.

Most catalog services run as accounts in the cloud. You sign up, and the list of every camera you own sits on someone's server. For plenty of people that trade is fine, and a synced logbook is genuinely useful.

For others it isn't. A film collection is, increasingly, a small pile of money on a shelf — clean rangefinder and SLR bodies have climbed into territory worth insuring, and a public list of what you own, what you paid, and roughly where you keep it is sensitive on its own. There's no need to tie that to an email and a login if you don't want to. Some collectors simply prefer that a record of what's in the cabinet doesn't live on a service that could change its terms, get acquired, or quietly start trying to broker the gear it was only meant to track.

Hoblio takes the other side of that trade. No marketplace, no account, no valuation feed. Just your own record, kept where you keep your phone.

What an old camera costs to own.

Add what a body cost, and Hoblio shows what it works out to for each day you've owned it — the price divided by the days it's been yours, worked out for you. A camera you actually shoot quietly settles into a small number. The shelf queen you bought at auction and never loaded stays a larger one. Tap Use on the days you run a roll through a body, and you'll also see which cameras really earn their place in the bag. No lecture. Just the figures, there when you want them.

A wishlist, kept honest.

The rangefinder you keep watching listings for. The medium-format body you want to handle before you commit to the weight and the cost of 120. Keep wanted cameras apart from the ones you own, so a want stays a want — and the shelf only grows when you mean it to.

Hoblio isn't for you if…

If what you mainly want is market values — to watch what clean bodies are fetching this month, or to list gear for sale — Hoblio isn't built for that, and won't be. It holds no price history, no valuation feed, and no marketplace. For that, used-gear price guides and sold-listing searches will serve you far better, and you should use them. The same goes if frame-by-frame shot logging is the point of the hobby: a dedicated film log is the right home. Hoblio is for the collector who just wants a calm, private record of what they own and what each body needs next — not a trading desk or a flight recorder.

Yours, and only yours.

Your collection lives on your phone. No account. No cloud. No tracking. Your serial numbers and what you paid stay on the device unless you export, share, send feedback, or verify a purchase. No subscription, either — Hoblio Pro is one price, paid once. And no streaks, no reminders to go shoot. A camera that's sat in a drawer since the 1980s isn't waiting on a notification; it'll keep until you're ready for it.