Stop retyping
film recipes

It really writes. Kata speaks the same USB protocol Fujifilm's X RAW Studio uses and sets all the custom-slot settings (film sim, DR, tones, WB shift, grain, colour chrome…) in one pass. Set the camera to USB RAW CONV./BACKUP RESTORE, plug in USB-C and tap write. Flick the mode dial once afterwards so the body re-reads its slots — then it's there in the menus too.

Verified end-to-end on the X-S20. Bodies with the X-Processor 5 (X-T5, X-H2, X-H2S, X-T50, X-M5, X-E5, X100VI, GFX100 II and newer) expose the same protocol and are expected to work — reports welcome. Older bodies are probed when you plug in: if the camera doesn't offer the slot properties, Kata says so instead of pretending. Full list under Bodies & slots.

Yes — the recipe library (in the app and on the web) is behind a free Google sign-in. It keeps your saved katas and published recipes with you across devices and keeps scrapers out of the community's work. No password, no email list, and the privacy page lists everything stored.

On the Linux app, yes. Drag a card onto C1, another onto C2, and press write once — Kata does them in a row, shows a field-by-field diff first and snapshots every slot it's about to touch. On the phone it's one slot at a time.

A QR code that holds the recipe itself, rather than a link to a website. Screenshot a card, print it, photograph it off a friend's phone: scanning it in Kata rebuilds the full recipe offline. Scan it with a normal QR app and you just see readable text starting with kata1:.

The starting library is 341 recipes from Fuji X Weekly, imported with credit, a link back to every original post, and sample photos used with permission. Community publishing adds more — everything is public immediately and curators review for the verified badge.

Ritchie Roesch works those recipes out on real cameras and gives them away free. Without that there would be nothing here to seed, so if you shoot with them, please become a Fuji X Weekly App Patron — it's what keeps the recipes coming.

Mostly no. Bodies that support preset names keep at most 25 characters; some (the X-S20 among them) store no name at all — the slot just shows its settings. The name lives in Kata and on the cards you share.

Kata only uses Fujifilm's own backup/restore surface — the same one X RAW Studio uses from a computer — writing the same settings you'd change by hand in the menus. It never touches firmware. Worst case observed: the camera ignores a value it doesn't support — which Kata reports and skips.

Early, and honest about it. The library, the editor, sharing, publishing and the USB writer all work today — the writer has been used on an X-S20 end to end, and the Linux desktop build drives the same engine, with a slot dock you can drag several katas onto. What that means for you: recipes you publish are safe (they live on the server with version history), and writes are guarded — you approve a diff first, and every slot is snapshotted before anything changes, so you can roll the camera back. What may still bite: bodies other than the X-S20 are less tested, a camera in HDR or D-Range Priority refuses some settings (Kata names them and tells you what to switch off), and you install the app from this site rather than the Play Store. If something misbehaves, that's worth telling me — it's how the supported-camera list grows.

Android first, because Android lets an app talk to a camera over the cable. There's a Linux version now too, with a slot board you can drag recipes onto. Windows and Mac aren't ready — on both, the system grabs the camera before Kata can, and getting past that is a separate piece of work for each. An iPhone version is possible — I just haven't built it. Apple charges US$99 a year to publish even a free app, and this is one person's side project. If enough people want it, it'll happen.

Free, open source (MIT), no tiers. Every feature is available to everyone — nothing is held back for a paid version. It exists because retyping 22 menu items per recipe is miserable. The catch is that it's one person's project — report a bug and it gets fixed.