A date stamp with real film in its blood
Some dates
deserve to glow.
Fotak brings back the date stamp your old film camera burned into the corner of every photo — the one that turned a snapshot into a moment you could place in time.
every style here is a real render, straight out of the app
Not printed. Burned in.
Most apps print a date.
Fotak exposes one.
A real date-back didn’t lay ink on your photo. It fired a tiny lamp at the film, exposing the date into the frame — so it fell away on a pale sky and blazed on a dark one. Fotak behaves the same way. Both halves below are the same stamp, same settings, same render.
one stamp — two backgrounds — nothing faked in between
Nothing invented
The date was already in there.
Every photo on your phone quietly carries the moment it was taken. Fotak doesn’t ask you to type it, guess it, or make it up — it reads the real capture date out of the file and puts it back where you can see it.
Stamp one photo or a whole trip at once. The originals are never touched; every stamped shot is saved as a new copy in its own album.
- File
- IMG_0413.HEIC
- Date taken
- 10 May 1995, 4:12 pm
- Camera
- Rear wide
- Read by
- Fotak, on your device
rendered in the app’s own typeface
No account. No upload. No internet connection required — your photos never leave your phone.
Six ways to remember
One date, six different decades.
Every style is its own hand-tuned recipe — its own typeface, its own glow, its own colour. Pick one to see it land on a real photo.
tap any style above to put it on the photo
Retro The warm orange glow of a late-80s point-and-shoot. Soft-edged and generous with its light — the one most people picture first.
Thirteen rolls, one camera
Pick a stock. Watch the light change.
Each one is a full colour recipe — its own white balance, its own contrast, its own grain — tuned to behave the way a real roll of film once did. Tap a canister to load it onto the photo below.
tap any canister above to load it
Standard Your photo's own natural colour.
Make it yours
Tune it once. Save it forever.
Nudge any look’s grain, colour and tone until it’s exactly right, then save it as your own Custom Stock — it sits right alongside the built-in 13, ready for the next photo. This is the real save screen, not a mock-up.
Name this stock
Custom stocks
No custom stocks saved yet
Free keeps your first save forever — Premium saves as many as you like.
Borrowed from real glass
The glow a mist filter gives you, dialled in.
Photographers pay for a black mist filter or a glow-glass lens for exactly this: bright edges bleeding softly into what’s around them. Fotak calls it Halation — a real slider inside Film Stock, with Strength, Threshold and Spread all yours to set. Off by default. Drag to see it land.
same photo, same look — only Halation moved
Obsessive by design
Drawn, not downloaded.
The details nobody would notice are the reason it feels right.
Custom-drawn typefaces
Every digit was redrawn from scratch for this app — segment angles, notch softness, the pointed film-year apostrophe. Not a free font with a glow filter on top.
Real Japanese spacing
Tokyo 昭和 sets its date the way vintage Japanese date-backs actually did: a breath after the year, none between month and day. The kanji carry the grouping, so nothing is padded out.
Tuned per style, by eye
Months of slow, patient work: each style set side by side with real film photographs, adjusted, compared, adjusted again — until it simply looked right. Then locked in for good.
Add the date.
Keep the moment.
Free to start. Works completely offline.
Available on Android & iOS