There’s a brand-new Fuji X Weekly App update that I’m really excited to share with you. The main headline is a new feature called Categories, which can be interacted with in two different ways. The goal of Categories is to help you find Film Simulation Recipes for the specific situation that you are photographing in. This update is beneficial for both Patrons and non-Patrons.

The first way to interact with Categories is if you choose a Recipe—any Recipe, it doesn’t matter which one—and scroll towards the bottom just above Notes, you’ll find a Category Tag or maybe a handful of them (the amount varies from Recipe-to-Recipe). This tells you that the particular Recipe you selected has been identified as good for those specific situations and/or aesthetics. Now, tap on a Category Tag and it opens Discover Recipes, except instead of showing you all of the photos in the entire App to browse through, it shows only those that share that tag. This can help you to find Recipes based on image aesthetic. Each time you tap on a Category Tag, the order of the photos is reshuffled. For Patron subscribers, Category Tags can be used in conjunction with Filter by Sensor or Filter by Camera.

The second way to interact with Categories is only available to Patron subscribers. If you tap Filter, you’ll see By Category has been added to the list of options. You can choose one or more Categories—as many as you like, but the more you choose the fewer results you’ll get. You can Filter By Cameras (say X100VI), Film Simulation (say Classic Negative), White Balance (say Auto, Auto Ambience Priority and Auto White Priority), and Categories (say Film-Like and Street), and you’ll get a few results that match your request quite well. You can get real specific. If you are looking for (let’s say) a Film-Like Recipe that’s good for Portraits on Cloudy days for your X-Pro3, you can find that.

This is such a fun new way to interact with Film Simulation Recipes, and I anticipate that it will be extremely helpful to those who don’t know which Recipes to try. I’m really excited to introduce Categories to you because of all that, and also because so much work went into it. I didn’t keep careful tabs on the exact number of hours spent on this project, but it was a lot! The task of categorizing the various Recipes (over 400!) was pretty daunting on its own. I’m sure that it’s not perfect, and some might disagree with a certain Recipe’s inclusion or exclusion from a specific Category, but overall I think it turned out quite well. I really hope that some of you will find it to be a useful feature.

***Update: We were able to get the bug identified, fixed, and the app update submitted and approved by Apple in record time. On your iPhone, if the Fuji X Weekly App crashes immediately, make sure that you update to version 1.12.1 (and not 1.12.0) or update the iOS to the latest version (either option will fix it). I’m sorry for any trouble that this may have caused anyone.***

The Fuji X Weekly App is available to download for free from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store! Consider becoming a Patron subscriber to unlock the best App experience and to support Fuji X Weekly. If your device didn’t update automatically, be sure to update it now.