Hipstamatic Reboots Camera Club Membership With Unified Access and Four New Analog Apps

Hipstamatic has announced a major reboot of its subscription service, Camera Club, alongside its Winter 26/27 app collection, which is included with it.

Hipstamatic is calling this reboot its answer to the idea of endless photography.

“A photograph used to cost something: film, money, a week of waiting for prints. Then pictures became free (with digital), then infinite (with cloud storage), and now, with a prompt, optional,” the company says. Hipstamatic’s answer is camera apps, which it is releasing in the Winter 26/27 pack.

“Every camera in Winter 26/27 goes the other way. Each one asks the photographer to do something at the moment it happens, so what comes out could only have happened once.”

The company says it’s not anti-AI, necessarily, but instead is against the idea of endless.

“People ask if we’re anti-AI. We’re not. We’re anti-endless. You can type a perfect picture of anything, then another one, and another. A prompt makes one of a million. You make one of one,” Lucas Buick, Hipstamatic’s co-founder, says.

“We didn’t start Hipstamatic to replace film. We started it because we were cheap and lazy. Polaroid had stopped making film, everything else cost a fortune, and we never had the right camera with us. But the phone was always in our pocket. So we started making camera apps for all the analog stuff we wish we had with us.”

Previously, Camera Club offered access to select packs and tools while standalone apps were often available separately. The revamp of Camera Club pulls down all those walls and unifies the offerings, giving subscribers access to everything Hipstamatic makes.

The Winter 26/27 release includes four new cameras: TinType, IncrediBooth, SwankoLab, and Cinamatic, as well as full, unlimited access to the Party! camera app.

TinType is based on wet-plate portrait photography.

“You sit still, the shutter fires, and you shake the plate while it develops. TinType 3 also includes Find TinType, a guide to 55 real wet-plate studios in 16 countries,” Hipstamatic explains.

IncrediBooth is a photo booth experience on iPhone, taking four frames as it counts down and produces a strip of images together.

SwankoLab is a pretty tactile experience for an app and is designed to mimic a darkroom and print shop.

“Tilt the phone to rock the developer tray. Pull the squeegee across a silkscreen at your own speed. There’s no randomness slider, and each result is a unique one-of-one print,” Hipstamatic says.

“The tech that powers SwankoLab is so much fun,” Ryan Dorshorst, Hipstamatic’s co-founder, adds. “You tip the tray and we use the gyroscope to simulate water carrying the pigment across the paper. When you pull the squeegee, the app reads how fast your finger is moving. The print is a record of what your hands did, so nobody can make it again. Including you.”

Cinamatic is a recreation of a 1980s camcorder, even down to the idea of using a tape.

Party! is a shared camera app that multiple people can contribute to. It is clearly targeted as best deployed at an event. Everyone shoots on the same camera all night and nobody can see the finished set of photos until the next morning.

The Camera Club membership includes every lens, film, and flash in Hipstamatic (more than 200), and its cameras, including the Winter 26/27 cameras, without limits. It costs $30 per year, $8 per month, or $20 for six months.