Featured at Tech Week 2026 · NYC
Launching Soon
A Film Lab First!

Securing the old
for what's new.

Content Credentials + Metadata, now on every scan.

Anyone can generate an image. Yours came from real film. Now, every scan from Gelatin Labs proves it: the whole story, sealed right inside the file.

Start your order → Verify a scan
Built with
CR Badge C2PA CAI ISCC
Contact sheet by Ryan Valasek
Contact sheet by Ryan Valasek
Contact sheet by Ryan Valasek
© Ryan Valasek · All Rights Reserved © Ryan Valasek · All Rights Reserved © Ryan Valasek · All Rights Reserved
© Ryan Valasek · All Rights Reserved

How do you prove
it's real?

Online, it's fast becoming the question of the decade. As AI learns to generate a convincing image of anything, proof of what's real is the thing that matters most.

Film already carries the answer. A frame is a physical thing: light and silver fixed onto a negative you can hold. For over a century, that negative has been the tangible proof a picture is real.

We're the first film lab to carry that proof online. Every scan we deliver is sealed with rich metadata and a cryptographic Content Credential, so what the negative proves stays attached to the file, for good. Old-school chemistry, meet modern provenance.

Rule of thirds.
Rule of fourths.

A finished scan from Gelatin is four things, stacked into a single file: your hard work, our expertise, a badge of authenticity, and the details to keep you organized.

Your film

Light, silver, time. The original.

Our scan

Up to 16-bit. The look you want, every frame.

Content Credentials

The open standard, signed by us and baked into the file.

Metadata

Roll number, stock, scanner, saved inside.

The Whole Picture: a photograph you can check, anywhere it goes.

A digital
notary stamp.

Our signature, pressed into every scan we deliver. So anyone, anywhere, can check where the picture came from.

What it is

A signature, baked into the picture.

The signature lives inside the picture file itself. It says, plainly: this came from Gelatin Labs, on this date.

Where it lives

On every frame. In every file.

Every digital scan we deliver carries the seal. It happens automatically, the moment your file comes off the scanner. No extra steps for you.

Why it matters

Proof stays with the picture.

Share it, post it, send it on. As long as the file’s intact, anyone with a Content Credentials reader can check the signature. And if an upload strips the metadata off, we can still match the picture back to the roll it came from — the fingerprint is ours to look up, and it doesn’t live in the metadata.

More about the seal
How it works

When your file comes off our scanner, our system signs it with a private key only we have. That signature gets bundled inside the picture file using an open standard called C2PA.

The standard

C2PA isn't ours. It's an open standard built and read by Adobe, BBC, Sony, and a growing list of companies. We build on those shared, open tools.

How to check it

Drop any of our scans into a free verifier (Pixelstream, the Content Credentials browser extension, or our own) and you get the whole record: lab, date, every step between the negative and your hard drive.

If the seal gets stripped

Some apps still strip metadata on export. If that happens, the picture itself is still the evidence: we compute a perceptual fingerprint of every scan we sign and keep it in our registry, so we can match a stripped file back to the roll it came from.

The proof is in theGelatinpudding.

One signed instruction, baked into every scan, that tells AI training systems: hands off this picture. Here’s what makes it stick.

Marked "do not train."

A formal, signed opt-out in every credential, written in the standard’s own vocabulary — so any system that honors it can read our answer without asking us.

Not just training.

The opt-out covers model training, inference, and data mining: one cryptographically signed signal across the entire AI pipeline.

Written into the file.

The opt-out is written into the signed credential itself. Edit it off and the signature breaks, so anyone reading the picture reads the terms with it.

From your roll
to your account.

Every scan moves through the same flow. From the moment film arrives at the lab to the moment a sealed file lands in an account.

GLABS-OS v1.0 STATUS: READY
01

INTAKE

Film arrives.

[ + ]
02

SCAN

Reviewed by hand.

[ + ]
03

SIGN

Seal embedded.

[ + ]
04

DELIVER

Lands in your account.

[ + ]
05

VERIFY

Anyone can read it.

[ + ]
> SELECT 01-05 TO EXPAND
GLABS-3000
Three layers

Inside the
credential.

01

The Seal

A signed Content Credential, embedded as we scan. Carries the lab, the timestamp, and the file's story so far. Any C2PA-aware tool reads it without setup.

C2PA · CR Badge

The seal is the visible, machine-readable layer. Open the file in Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, or the free Content Credentials browser extension and you'll see who signed it and when. The signature is verifiable against the public trust list.

If someone strips the metadata, the seal goes with it — and the origin record with it. That’s why the fingerprint exists. It lives in the picture itself, so stripping metadata leaves it untouched.

02

The Fingerprint

A perceptual hash of the picture itself, kept in our registry. Bring us an image months or years later, resized or re-saved or screenshotted, and we can match it back to the scan it came from.

Perceptual hash · Matched in our registry

The hash describes what the picture looks like. Re-save it as a JPEG, resize it for the web, screenshot it, nudge the colour, and it still lands on the same scan.

Unlike the seal, fingerprint matching is something we do through Gelatin Labs. We hold the registry. Send us an image, we’ll tell you if it came from one of our scans. (The credential also carries an ISCC content ID, but that travels inside the file — strip the credential and it goes too. The registry is what survives that.)

03

The Origin

The credential names a physical piece of film as the parent of the file, and records whether it was a negative or a positive. Every scan we deliver points back to something you could hold.

Physical film · Declared at the source

Most Content Credentials start at a camera. Ours start one step earlier: at a strip of film that existed before any file did. The credential records that the scan was opened from a physical original, using the IPTC vocabulary the industry already reads — negativeFilm or positiveFilm, chosen from the actual process your roll ran through.

It’s the part a generated image can’t honestly claim. There was a negative. We scanned it. That’s what we signed.

Inside every file

Everything your
scan carries.

Open a sealed scan in Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, or any verifier and you can read the whole record.

Content Credentials Inspector
14592_35mm_Kodak-GC-400_003.gel.jpg
Verified Credential Issued by Gelatin Labs
Looks Good
Signature
Signed by Gelatin Labs
Issued 2026-05-15 · 14:47 EDT
Standard C2PA 2.2
Fingerprint In our registry
Source Physical film negative
Capture
Roll number 14592
Format 35mm color neg
Stock Kodak GC 400
Scanner Fujifilm SP-3000
Process C-41 · negative
See what every field means
Signature
Signed byOur signature on the file. Verifiable against the public C2PA trust list.
IssuedExact date and time the scan came off the scanner.
StandardC2PA 2.2, the open industry standard, read by Adobe, BBC, Sony, and a growing list.
FingerprintA perceptual hash of the picture. Survives re-saves, resizing, screenshots and colour tweaks. Looked up through our registry.
SourceDeclares the file was opened from a physical film original, and whether it was a negative or a positive.
Capture
Roll numberYour roll's tracking number, the same one in your Gelatin account.
FormatFilm format (35mm, 120, sheet), recorded alongside the stock.
StockFilm brand and emulsion (Kodak Portra, Ilford HP5, others), recorded at intake.
ScannerWhich of our scanners produced this frame.
ProcessThe development process the roll ran through (C-41, E-6, ECN-2, black & white), and any push or pull.
Story
Scan recordThe signed record that this file was opened from the physical film named above, and the scanner software that did it.
What metadata is, and what it does

Info that lives inside the picture.

Metadata is the hidden info tucked inside every picture file: roll number, film stock, scanner, date. You can't see it on the photo, but Lightroom, Bridge, Capture One, even Finder can read it, sort by it, and search it.

Search by anything.

Type a roll number, a stock, a scanner, or a date into Lightroom or Bridge, and the matching scans pop up. Folders become optional.

Sort itself.

Smart collections that group by GelForm, stock, or roll. Set them up once, and they update every time you import.

Stays with the file.

The info lives inside the picture itself, so it follows along when you copy, move, share, or back it up.

More on metadata
What's in it

Roll number, format, stock, processing, scanner, GelForm, capture date, written in standard fields that any modern photo app can read.

Where it shows up

Lightroom Classic, Bridge, Photoshop, Capture One, Apple Photos. Even Finder and Windows Explorer can see most of it.

Presets love it

Build a Lightroom preset that targets "GelForm = The Spacely" and it applies only to those scans. Same logic for stock, scanner, anything else.

Faster than folders

Type a roll number into any of these apps and the matching scans come up, wherever they live on your hard drive.

What lands on your drive

Named so you
can find it.

Every order arrives as clean, numbered folders, and every frame carries its roll, format, stock, and frame number in the filename. No DSC_0042. No guessing which roll a picture came from two years from now.

Every order is one clean folder, with a numbered folder for each roll inside it. And that .gel is ours — our own mark for a scan carrying a verified Content Credential, readable right in the filename.

The scanners

Noritsu and Frontier, calibrated together.

We run the Noritsu HS-1800 and the Fujifilm Frontier, two of the most trusted names in film scanning, and keep them calibrated to within 1–2% of each other. Two rolls from the same shoot look like the same shoot, whichever machine they ran on.

The files

Up to 16-bit, uncompressed.

Premium TIFF delivers 16-bit color depth and the full dynamic range the negative actually holds, up to 250 MB a frame and a 40″ print. Archive and Basic TIFF stay uncompressed too. The bit depth you're delivered is the bit depth we signed.

The finish

Cleaned before it's sealed.

Color scans go through our own color-noise control, hardware and software working together, and black & white through our dust management — all before any credential is applied. The picture is finished first, then sealed, so what you verify is exactly what you were sent.

Who's behind it

We're not doing
this alone.

Content Credentials are an industry standard, built by a coalition. Here's who we work with to make it real for film.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. The technical standard behind the seal.

The Content Authenticity Initiative. The coalition driving real-world adoption across the industry.

Built the original verifier. Bridge and Photoshop read the credential natively. Hosted us at Tech Week.

Collaborator at Tech Week. Content credentials workflow at scale. Verify at verify.pixelstream.com.

Your scans read natively in
PsPhotoshop
LrLightroom
BrBridge
C1Capture One
Where did Content Credentials come from?

Content Credentials grew out of two efforts. In 2019, Adobe launched the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), with The New York Times and Twitter, to fight misinformation by giving digital media a verifiable history. In 2021, Adobe, Arm, the BBC, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic formed the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to turn that idea into an open technical standard.

It's an open industry standard, governed by a coalition of companies. We're the first film lab to build it into every scan, so the same provenance the news industry trusts now travels with your negatives.

Try it

See it for yourself.

Drop one of your scans into the Gelatin verifier and it checks two things at once: the cryptographic signature on the file, and the visual fingerprint we hold in our registry — which still matches even when the signature has been stripped away.

Works in Pixelstream and the Content Credentials browser extension too. Adobe’s verifier reads our credentials; whether it shows our certificate as trusted depends on its own trust list, which we don’t control.

Open the verifier →

Gelatin Labs is a C2PA Conformant Generator. Our verifier validates signing certificates against the official C2PA trust list; certification as a conformant validator is in progress.

14592_35mm_Kodak-GC-400_003.gel.jpg ✓ Verified
Issued by Gelatin Labs Authentic film scan · signature valid
  • ✓SignatureValid · C2PA 2.2
  • ✓SourcePhysical film negative
  • ✓FingerprintMatches our registry
The fingerprint survives re-saving, resizing, and re-encoding.
From the community

Real people.
Real film.

We're analog creatures. The work below is real film, made by real hands, shot by the photographers who trust us with their rolls. Authentic from the very first frame.

Explore the community →
Tobias Nolan Documentary · Nikon FM
Michael Gloria Event · Contax 645
Matt Haag Fashion · Contax G2
Claire Bruder Landscape · Pentax 67
Sakti Woodbury Landscape · Canon AE-1
Joel Arbaje Portraiture · Pentax 67II
Monika Eisenbart Portraiture · Fujifilm GA645
Corey Allen Street · Canon P
Miguel Ginhwell Garcia Street · Leica M3
Tiffani Vogel Still Life · Canon AE-1
★★★★★ 4.9 average · 600+ Google reviews

"Love that the scans are flat and enormous. I received my scans in less than 24 hours."

Melissa E.

"One of the best in the world that I've used. Un-paralleled quality in scans so far. Incredible latitude in post for me, fast and friendly too!"

Kevin T.

"I'm blown away by Gelatin Labs for their professionalism, and young fresh take on a photography lab. They make everything so easy! Their scans are to die for!"

Megan O.

"Gelatin is the best in the game! I love the flexibility their flat GelForm Style offers me, and there's simply no one else I would trust with my film."

Ryan B.

Meet the lab.

Gelatin Labs is a family-owned film lab in Maplewood, NJ and the East Village, NYC. We develop, scan, and print real film by hand. We sweat the scan quality, the GelForm looks, fast turnaround, and being a team you can actually reach. Content Credentials are one more way we take care of your work.

Scans worth raving about.

Up to 16-bit color on pro Noritsu and Fujifilm Frontier scanners. We obsess over every tone so your work looks its absolute best.

The GelForm Library.

Ten scan styles, from The Standard to The Spacely. Pick the look you want. We handle the rest.

Fast when it counts.

Fast Pass and standard turnaround. We get your images back quickly, without ever cutting corners.

Real people who answer.

Every roll runs past our team, and we're easy to reach. Email us and a real person writes back.

Learn more about the lab →
The team
Photo by Jason Weinpel
At the counter
Photo by Sasha Tsyrlin
Solo portrait
Lab, Colenta processor
Try it yourself

Ten GelForms,
one negative.

GelForm is our own set of scan styles. The negative never changes — what changes is the color, the contrast, and how much of the film edge we leave in. Tap through and see.

Sample photos by Jakob Lilja-Ruiz. All the GelForms.

Whichever you choose, the credential records the same things: the roll, the film, the scanner, and the negative it came from.

Your account

Skip the inbox.
Grab your scans.

We've modernized getting your film back. Download your scans, track your roll through the lab, read notes from our team, and revisit the options you picked, all in one place. No digging through email, no expiring links.

Download your scans.

Full-resolution files, ready whenever you want. Re-download for a minimum of 30 days.

Track your roll.

Watch it move through the lab in real time: received, developing, scanning, ready.

Notes & your options.

See notes from our team and the exact options you chose, GelForm style and all, on every order.

Go to your account →
My Account
Roll 25838 Kodak Ektacolor 800 · 36 frames · 35mm
Ready
Received Developed Scanned Ready
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
+29
Ready?

The whole
picture.

Real film, scanned by Gelatin, developed with care, signed for authenticity, organized down to the frame, and kept safe in your account. It's how we're securing the old for what's new.

Start your order →
Stay tuned for the official launch.

Every roll. Every scan. Sealed.