INTAKE
Film arrives.
Content Credentials + Metadata, now on every scan.
Your image's whole story, saved right inside the file. Proves your images came from real film, scanned by a verified lab.
Core to the process is authenticity. And core to authenticity is trust — in the lab, in the negative, in the hands that made the scan.
Film is the ultimate “real” medium. Moments captured in light, silver, and time — immortalized on a strip you can print, digitize, and enjoy for generations. For more than a century, the negative has been the tangible proof a photograph is real.
When we scan it, the negative becomes pixels — and traditionally, that proof gets left behind. We think it should travel with the file instead.
So we keep it where it belongs: inside the picture, forever.
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.
Light, silver, time. The original.
16-bit care. The look you want, every frame.
The open standard, signed by us and baked into the file.
Roll number, stock, scanner, saved inside.
Our signature, pressed into every scan we deliver. So anyone, anywhere, can check where the picture came from.
The signature lives inside the picture file itself. It says, plainly: this came from Gelatin Labs, on this date.
Every digital scan we deliver carries the seal. It happens automatically, the moment your file comes off the scanner. No extra steps for you.
Share it, screenshot it, repost it. While the file's intact, anyone can verify the signature. And even after a screenshot strips it, our watermark and fingerprint let us confirm it came from us.
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.
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.
Drop any of our scans into a free Content Credentials verifier (ours, Adobe's, or the browser extension) and the file will lay out what it knows: lab, date, the chain from negative to your hard drive.
Some apps still strip metadata on export. If that happens, the picture still carries a perceptual fingerprint and an invisible watermark we can match, both of which point back to us.
Three signals we bake into every scan that tell AI training systems: hands off this picture.
A formal C2PA opt-out tag in every credential. Adobe, OpenAI, and the major training systems read it and skip the file.
Every scan carries a cryptographic opt-out signal in its Content Credential, blocking AI training, inference, and data mining. AI-aware crawlers that read Content Credentials honor it.
An invisible watermark, baked into the pixels. It survives crops, re-encodes, even screenshots, so the opt-out we add stays attached to your picture.
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.
Film arrives.
Reviewed by hand.
Seal embedded.
Lands in your account.
Anyone can read it.
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.
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, which is why the next two layers exist.
A perceptual ID we keep in our registry. Bring us an image months or years later (even after crops, edits, or re-encodes) and we can match it back to the original.
ISCC (International Standard Content Code) is a perceptual identifier. It sees the image, not just the bytes. Crop it, color-grade it, re-save as JPEG: the ID still matches the original 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.
An invisible mark woven into the pixels themselves. Survives screenshots, screen recordings, and the squeeze of platform compression.
TrustMark embeds an imperceptible signal directly in the pixel data. Unlike metadata, it survives the cases where metadata gets stripped: Instagram uploads, screen recordings, screenshot apps.
Together with the fingerprint, the watermark is what stays with the image even after a screenshot. Two ways to recognize your work, even when the seal is gone.
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.
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 rather than any one company. We're the first film lab to build it into every scan, leading analog photography toward a future where the same provenance the news industry trusts travels with your negatives too.
Drop one of your scans into the Gelatin verifier and it checks three things at once: the signature, the invisible watermark in the pixels, and the fingerprint we hold in our registry.
Works in Adobe's verifier, Pixelstream, and the Content Credentials browser extension too.
C2PA conformance pending. We're completing certification as a conformant validator.
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.
Meet the people behind Gelatin →
"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.
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.
16-bit color on pro Noritsu and Fujifilm Frontier scanners. We obsess over every tone so your work looks its absolute best.
11 scan styles, from The Standard to The Spacely. Pick the look you want. We handle the rest.
Fast Pass and standard turnaround. We get your images back quickly, without ever cutting corners.
Every roll runs past our team, and we're easy to reach. Email us and a real person writes back.
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.
Full-resolution files, ready whenever you want. Re-download for a minimum of 30 days.
Watch it move through the lab in real time: received, developing, scanning, ready.
See notes from our team and the exact options you chose, GelForm style and all, on every order.
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✓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.
Every roll. Every scan. Sealed.