Let's talk about the current status of GrainHunter. The creation of this unprecedented film photography database has been going relatively smoothly. The structure is now quite stable, and there shouldn't be any major changes going forward. As of today (May 9, 2025), this site has archived real film photos from 59 film stocks, 50 film cameras, and 74 lenses. Although there are only 193 photos so far, each image can be explored through various dimensions—such as the same film with different lenses, the same focal length across different formats, or the same subject shot with different cameras.
A few days ago, I shared the concept behind GrainHunter for the second time at a WordPress developer meetup. My goal is to finish everything by the end of 2025. Personally, I believe that as long as each dimension has at least three sample photos, this site can be considered complete and ready for public promotion.
That said, this site is currently facing a major issue: its SEO performance is quite poor. Since it's built on a modified WooCommerce system, Google doesn't seem to understand the structure and treats it as a collection of incomplete product listings. Because of this, I started tagging each image with three labels and naming them accordingly, in an attempt to help search engines better recognize the content. Unfortunately, the results still haven't been great. But that's okay—I'll just keep going. In the future, it's very likely that the visual content on this site will be available only through paid access, with the database itself offered via subscription. SEO efforts will then be handled by the built-in blog system on this site.
Olympus OM-2 (1975)
Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f2 SL Aspherical (1/15, f2)
Ilford Ortho Plus 80
