A Polaroid holds one film pack at a time, and a pack holds eight shots. Photographers who own several cameras carry several film types at once, and then have to remember which pack is in which body, and how many frames are left in each.

Instant Box is the inventory. Add your cameras, track your film packs, assign packs to bodies, log the date of a shoot. The count lives in the app instead of in your head.

Instant Box started as an experiment in AI-assisted development and ended up on the App Store. Prototyping was far faster than it would have been otherwise.

No design decision was made by AI. Every position, colour and element was designed in Figma first, then described or shown to the model, and often refined by hand afterwards. The custom icons for each camera type and the colour coding for each film stock came from that manual pass: they’re what makes the inventory readable at a glance rather than a list of names. They’re the human touches that give the app its personality.

Because the app came from a real need, it was tested on actual shoots from the first build. A few adjustments came out of that, and it’s been in use ever since, published on the App Store and still maintained.