How we source recipes

The settings are the numbers: film simulation, white balance shift, dynamic range, tone curve, color, grain, sharpness, clarity, toning. A list of values that makes a camera behave a certain way. Like the quantities in a cooking recipe or a chord progression, functional facts are generally not something anyone owns. Nobody owns “Highlight +2, Shadow +1, Grain Strong”.

The expression is the recipe's name, its written description, its sample photographs, and the maker's reputation. That is real creative work, and it is where a creator's goodwill actually lives.

We may reuse settings when they clear the tests below. We never reuse expression.

This section is about recipes we source. Recipes contributed by the community are covered further down, and the rules are different because the work is not ours.

A recipe we source qualifies only if its origin is one of these:

Our own work, derived from scratch. An emulation of a real analog film stock, which is a mass-market physical product and not any one person's property. Something the author explicitly released to the public domain. Something from Fujifilm's own official materials. Or a genuine folk look: the same settings appearing across many independent sources with no consistent single attribution.

And in every case we do all of the following: name it ourselves, write our own description, shoot our own sample photographs, verify the settings on a real camera, and never imply that a named creator authored or endorsed it.

If a recipe is signature work by an identifiable creator, we do not ship a renamed clone of it, even where the law would allow us to. If it was ever paywalled, from a paid pack or a subscription tier, we do not touch it. If the reason anyone wants it is that it is theirs, then it is theirs.

When provenance is ambiguous, we treat it as owned. We would rather ship a smaller library we are proud of than a bigger one we have to defend. For anything close to the line we ask permission instead, and credit the creator.

Most of the library will not be ours. Anyone with a Huginn account can contribute a recipe, free or Pro, and contributing is free: we do not gate it behind a subscription, because a library built only from what we had time to make ourselves would be a worse library.

A contribution is the opposite of the section above. The contributor names it, writes its description, and shoots its sample photographs, and it carries their name, their handle, and a link to their creator page. We review it before it appears, and we do not rewrite someone's expression into our own house voice.

Contributors keep their recipes. Publishing here is not exclusive and does not stop anyone using, changing, or publishing their own work anywhere else. What they grant is a permanent licence for us to keep distributing it, because other people save these into their own libraries and plan shoots around them.

A photograph straight out of a camera carries more than the picture. Before a sample frame is uploaded, Huginn removes the parts of it that identify a person or a place:

Removed, always.GPS coordinates, so publishing a recipe never publishes where you were standing. Your camera body's serial number, which would otherwise link every photograph you ever publish to the same physical camera. And the copyright, artist and owner fields, which some bodies are configured to stamp with a real name.

Kept, on purpose. The camera model, the lens, the exposure settings, and the film simulation data the camera wrote. That is the evidence that a sample frame really was shot with the recipe it sits beside, and it is what lets anyone rebuild a look from a photograph. A frame stripped of it would be a pretty picture that proves nothing.

This happens on your device, before anything is sent. It applies to every photograph attached to a recipe, not only to contributed ones.

There are two ways a recipe ends up with no name on it. You can choose it when you contribute, and it happens automatically if you later delete your account. Either way the recipe is credited to Community, a shared house account that every anonymous contribution shares, so there is no per person set to piece back together.

Anonymous is permanent. A recipe contributed without your name cannot be claimed later. We do keep a private record of who submitted what, which is how we settle it if someone says a community recipe copied their work, but that record is for resolving disputes and is not a route back to a byline. Your own copy stays on your device and stays yours, whichever way you go.

When someone deletes their Huginn account, the recipes they published stay in the library and become anonymous contributions. Every identifying detail is removed: name, handle, biography, avatar, and links. The handle is retired permanently rather than released, so nobody else can take it and inherit a departed creator's public page.

An anonymised recipe does not become ours. We do not reattribute it to The Forge, we do not put our name on it, and we do not present it as house work. It stays what it is: a recipe someone in this community made and chose to leave behind. It is listed as a contribution with no creator attached.

Worth knowing before you delete: anonymisation cannot be undone. Once the link between you and the recipe is gone it cannot be restored, so a recipe cannot be credited back to you later, and a takedown request for it cannot be matched to you either. Your own copy stays on your device and stays yours.

If you believe a recipe in Huginn is yours, write to us and we will look at it properly.

Submitting a request is not by itself a removal. Every free recipe in the library has already been through the sourcing work above and has a written record of why it qualified, so an assertion on its own is not enough to act on. What we need is dated evidence that the recipe was published under your name before it appeared in Huginn: a dated post, a screenshot, an archived page, anything that establishes the timeline.

With that, we act promptly and without argument. We either remove the recipe, or, if you would rather, convert it into a properly credited recipe with your name on it and a link to your work. Where the evidence is genuinely ambiguous we lean toward you, because goodwill costs less than a fight.

That bar exists in both directions. It protects creators who really did make something, and it protects the library from claims with nothing behind them.

Request a takedown →

Because we love this. The recipes, the sample frames, the write-ups, the people who spend a weekend chasing a look and then give it away: that community is the reason Huginn exists at all. We are photographers and makers ourselves, and the point of this library is to lift the people who create, never to take from them.

So we ask first. We put the creator's name on their work everywhere it appears. And if someone tells us we got it wrong, we make it right. Not because a line in a law book requires it, but out of respect for the people whose work made this craft worth building an app around.