Help & Documentation

Most strange behaviour comes from a stale browser cache or a temporary glitch. Run through this short list before digging deeper.

• Refresh the page (Ctrl+R or Cmd+R).
• If a refresh doesn't help, do a hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R, or Cmd+Shift+R on macOS). This forces the browser to re-download the app instead of using its cache. Phones and tablets have no such shortcut — on iPhone, iPad or Android, open Settings → Hard refresh instead, which does the same thing from inside the app.
• Close every tab of the app, then open it again.
• Open the app in a private/incognito window. If the problem goes away, a browser extension is the likely cause.
• Try a different browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge). If it works there, the issue is specific to your usual browser.
• Restart the computer. Sounds basic — clears memory pressure and forces a clean start.

Help → Assistant answers questions about the app, about keyboard shortcuts and about device specifications, using this app’s own knowledge base, shortcut list and device library as its only sources. The assistant is Mr Watts, the camera mascot — the heading and the sparkle button both call him by name, and in the pink theme he is Miss Watts.

1. Open the sidebar and click Help.
2. Switch to the 'Assistant' tab.
3. Type a question — how a feature works, a keyboard shortcut, or the specs of a device in the catalog.
4. Read the answer, then open any of the linked knowledge base sections it cites to go deeper — topics with a guided tour also offer 'Show me', which starts that tour directly.
5. Use 'Copy answer' to take an answer with you, or 'Ask again' to retry a question that failed.
6. If the answer doesn't solve it, use 'This didn't help — report it' — the bug report form opens with your question and the answer already filled in.

Inside a project the assistant can also do a few things, not only explain them. It never acts on its own: it proposes, you read an itemised confirmation naming the exact change, and nothing happens until you accept. The confirmation always tells you how the change is taken back — for most of them that is the project's undo history, and for the two that reach beyond your own project it says plainly what the route back really is, including when there isn't one.

1. Open the assistant from the sparkle button at the bottom right of a project, or from Help → Assistant.
2. Ask for the change in your own words — “rename this project to Sunset Shoot”, “add an auto-gear rule called Lens kit”, “set the delivery resolution to 4K”, “turn on collaboration”, “invite anna@example.com”.
3. Read the confirmation. It names the project and both sides of every change, for example “Delivery Resolution: 1080p → 4K”.
4. Read the last line especially. It says how this particular change is reversed, and it is not the same sentence every time.
5. Accept it, or refuse. Refusing changes nothing at all.
6. Undo the everyday changes afterwards from the project's undo history, like any other edit.

The assistant is told which screen you are looking at when you ask — the route, the workspace section, and the name of the open project. It uses that to resolve “here”, “this page” and “this tab”, and it pulls in the help topic that documents that screen even when your question shares no words with it.

• The screen is named with the app’s own labels — the same breadcrumb and section names you see — so an answer never invents a name for a screen.
• Inside a project it also knows which section you are in (Gear List, Crew, Budget, Carnet, and so on) and what that section is for.
• Open the Help centre from anywhere and the assistant still refers to the screen you came FROM, not to Help itself.
• A turn that included your screen says so underneath the answer, in the same place as the session-details note.
• It does not receive anything on the screen — no gear, no crew, no rates, no attachments. Only the screen’s name, its purpose, and the open project’s title.

Alongside these help topics, the assistant searches the pages of the Documentation section. The step-by-step detail for each feature lives in the help topics themselves.

• A citation names the page and its section, so you can open the exact place it answered from.
• Documentation sections and help topics are ranked together, so whichever actually answers your question comes first.
• It helps most on questions about connecting an AI agent to your account through the MCP server. For everything else the help topics are the source.
• With AI switched off you still get the matching documentation sections listed, the same way help sections and device records are.

The app stores everything locally in your browser using IndexedDB (a built-in browser database). If that storage is blocked or full, saves fail silently. Here's how to check.

• You can't be in private/incognito mode. Most browsers refuse to write IndexedDB there, so closing the tab loses everything.
• Check that the site is allowed to store data. In Chrome/Edge: click the lock icon in the address bar → Site settings → make sure Cookies and site data is allowed. In Safari: Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data.
• Make sure you have free disk space. The browser shares one storage quota across all sites and will refuse to write if the disk is nearly full.
• Privacy extensions (uBlock, Privacy Badger, AdGuard, etc.) sometimes block storage on app domains. Try with extensions disabled.
• If storage is fine but data still disappears, you may be signed into a different account than usual — your cloud projects only show under the account that owns them.

1. Open the app in your usual browser.
2. Make a small change to any project.
3. Click the sidebar account button (bottom-left). Look for the local-save indicator — when it shows 'Just now' or 'Saved at <time>', the save worked.
4. If the indicator never updates, hard-refresh the page (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R) and try again.
5. If it still doesn't update, open a new private/incognito window and visit the app. If saves work there, the original browser profile is the problem — usually an extension or a tight storage policy.

PDFs are generated entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to a server. Most export problems come from popup blockers, empty content, or the browser running out of memory on very large projects.

• If clicking Export does nothing visible, the download was probably blocked. Check the address bar for a blocked-popup or blocked-download icon, click it, and allow downloads from this site.
• Open the project and confirm it actually has items — an empty project produces a blank PDF.
• Use Preview before downloading. If the preview looks right but the download fails, the issue is at the browser/download step, not the PDF itself.
• Very large projects (1000+ items, or large embedded images) take 30–120 seconds to render. Don't refresh while the spinner is up.
• If nothing produces a result, press F12 to open the browser console and look for red error lines. Those are useful to attach to a bug report.

1. Confirm the project has content.
2. Click Preview and check that the layout, items, and totals look right.
3. If Preview is fine, click Download. Watch the address bar for blocked-download icons.
4. If the download still fails, try a different browser. Chrome and Firefox handle large PDFs most reliably.
5. Still failing? Export a single category at a time to find which one breaks. Then report it — see 'How to send a bug report' below.

Cloud Sync is the optional feature that mirrors your data to the cloud so you can use the app from multiple devices. It only runs after you sign in AND grant the Cloud Sync consent (see the Cloud Sync help article). If it's misbehaving, walk through these checks.

• You must be online. Sync queues changes while offline and uploads them when the connection returns.
• Cloud Sync consent must be granted. Consent is decided in the one-time Cloud Sync consent dialog after your first sign-in; if it's still 'Not yet decided' or you withdrew it, sync stays paused until you grant (or re-grant) consent when prompted.
• You must be signed into the same account on every device that should share data.
• If a corporate firewall or VPN blocks the Supabase domain, sync will silently fail. Try from a non-corporate network to confirm.
• Your computer's clock must be roughly correct. Auth tokens fail if the system time is wildly off.
• Very large libraries (hundreds of devices, dozens of projects) can take several minutes for the first sync. The progress indicator in the sidebar account area is the source of truth.

1. Open the sidebar account button (bottom-left). The icon shows your current sync state: synced, syncing, or offline.
2. If it shows 'offline' but you have internet, sign out and sign back in. That resets the connection.
3. Wait a couple of minutes after signing in. First-sync after a long offline period can be slow.
4. If a sync conflict dialog appears, do NOT skip it. Read both sides, choose 'Keep local' or 'Use cloud' explicitly (or 'Merge items' for lists). Skipping leaves your local copy out of sync.
5. Open the browser console (F12) and check for messages starting with 'syncEngine' — those tell you exactly which entity failed.

Backups restore from .json or .gz files. Equipment imports use CSV. Most failures come from the wrong file format or a CSV with the wrong column headers.

• Backup files: must be the .json or .gz files exported from Cine Power Planner. ZIPs and other formats won't work.
• CSV imports: the first line must be a header row, comma-separated, with these column names exactly: Category, Name, Quantity, Details, Status. Category is optional in single-category mode.
• Status column values: rental, owned_user, owned_contact, or crewmember. The legacy value 'owned' is still accepted and maps to owned_user.
• Large imports (1000+ rows) can take a couple of minutes. Don't close the tab while the spinner is up.
• If a row is missing a Name, it gets skipped. The preview shows you how many rows were skipped before you confirm.
• If many rows fail, split the file in half and import the halves separately to find the bad section.

1. Open the file in any text editor to confirm it isn't empty or scrambled.
2. For CSV: confirm the first line is comma-separated with the right column names.
3. Open the project, open the Import dialog, and paste a small chunk (5–10 rows) first.
4. If the preview looks right, paste the rest.
5. Watch the preview counters — they tell you how many rows will import, how many were skipped, and how many categories will be created.

Slowness usually comes from the browser running low on memory, too many active projects, or a very large device library.

• Close other browser tabs. Each tab uses memory; 30+ tabs is often the cause.
• Archive projects you're not currently working on. The dashboard still lets you reach them, but they no longer load on startup.
• Clear the browser cache (Ctrl+Shift+Delete / Cmd+Shift+Delete) if the app feels sluggish after an update.
• Disable browser extensions one at a time — ad blockers, password managers, and screen recorders can each cost real performance.
• Update the browser. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge all ship frequent performance fixes.
• Very large device libraries (2000+ entries) make search a touch slower. Star the items you use most often so they sort first.

1. Count open tabs. If you're at 20+, close most of them and reload.
2. Go to the All Projects dashboard and archive anything you don't need this month.
3. Clear cached files (Ctrl+Shift+Delete / Cmd+Shift+Delete) and reload.
4. Disable browser extensions one by one until the slowdown stops — the last one you disabled is the culprit.
5. If none of the above helps, restart the browser, then the computer.

Cine Power Planner can be installed as a Progressive Web App so it runs like a regular desktop or mobile app. If the install button isn't appearing, one of the requirements isn't met.

• The site must be served over HTTPS. The install prompt never appears on http:// (so it's never available on http://localhost in production-style use).
• On iPhone/iPad you must use Safari. Chrome and Firefox on iOS don't expose the PWA install path.
• On Android, Chrome and Edge show 'Add to Home screen' from their menu.
• On desktop, look for the install icon at the right edge of the address bar (Chrome/Edge). Firefox doesn't currently install PWAs from the address bar.
• Some corporate-managed devices block PWA install via policy. There's nothing you can do client-side in that case — use the regular browser tab.

1. Make sure your browser is up to date.
2. Confirm the URL starts with https://.
3. Look for the install icon in the address bar or the browser's menu.
4. If the icon doesn't appear, hard-refresh once (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R) and check again.
5. On iOS Safari: tap the Share button, then 'Add to Home Screen'.

Search is fuzzy but literal — it matches against project names, client names, locations, device names, and contact names. If it's not finding something, you're probably searching against the wrong field.

• Search is case-insensitive. The Search page looks in project notes and category notes too; the search box on All Projects only matches a project's name or client.
• Try a partial word. Searching 'cam' finds Camera, Canon, Camcorder.
• If you're in a project, Cmd/Ctrl + F focuses the in-project category search instead of opening the global search. To go to global search from anywhere, use the Search entry in the sidebar.
• The Search page searches from the first character. The Quick Switcher shows projects from the first character and everything else from the second.
• Archived projects are found, but ranked below active ones. Projects in the Trash are not searched — restore them first ('View Trash' on All Projects).

As of v0.222 (CS-17), profile pictures, contact pictures, gear pictures, project assets, and call-sheet attachments live in private storage buckets and load via short-lived signed URLs. Almost every 'broken image' falls into one of the buckets below.

• Hard-refresh (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + R) — forces the signed-URL hook to mint fresh URLs.
• Check that you're signed in. Signed URLs only work for an authenticated session — a signed-out browser sees nothing.
• An image URL you bookmarked or copied to an external doc before CS-17 (the old public URL) now returns HTTP 400. Open the source page in the app and re-share — the share flow generates a fresh signed link.
• If a profile picture uploads but then fails to render after a refresh, the file may be corrupt or too large. Use JPG / PNG / WEBP under ~5 MB.
• If images render on one device but not another, the second device is probably signed out or signed in to a different account.

Display issues are almost always browser-level: zoom, font overrides, dark-mode mismatches, or an extension injecting CSS.

• Reset zoom to 100% (Ctrl+0 / Cmd+0). Non-100% zoom can break layouts.
• If buttons don't respond at all, hard-refresh once (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R) to make sure you have the latest JavaScript.
• Dark mode follows the theme you pick in Settings → General (Light, Dark, or Pink). It is independent of your OS dark-mode setting unless you choose 'System' there.
• If fonts look wrong, check your browser's font-override settings — some users force a custom font that breaks layouts.
• If layout is broken in just one browser, try another one to confirm it isn't a global problem.

Before assuming data is gone, walk through this. In practice, almost every 'lost' project is archived, in the Trash, filtered out, or signed-in under a different account.

• Check the Trash first. Open the dashboard and click the 'View Trash' link (it routes to /trash). Soft-deleted projects sit there until you choose 'Delete permanently', and a single click restores them.
• Click 'View Archived' on All Projects. Archived projects are not in the main list; they have their own page, where Restore in a card's ⋯ menu brings one back.
• Confirm you're signed into the same account you usually use, if you have multiple.
• If you use Cloud Sync, open the app on another device — the project may have synced there.
• Open Settings → Backup & Data and check the auto-backup list. The app keeps recent local snapshots you can restore from.
• If you have a manual backup file (.json or .gz) from a different day, you can import it from Settings → Backup & Data.

1. Don't panic, and don't run a factory reset yet — that erases what's still there.
2. Open All Projects and click 'View Trash' — a deleted project is one click away from restoration there.
3. Click 'View Archived' on All Projects to check the archived ones.
4. If still missing, open Settings → Backup & Data and review the auto-backups.
5. Pick the most recent backup that should contain the project, and restore it.
6. If you can't recover it locally and you use Cloud Sync, sign out and sign back in to force a fresh pull from the cloud.

Since v0.495.0 the app no longer simply refuses an oversized attachment — it compresses it to fit the surface's limit first. Each surface keeps its own ceiling (5 MB for bug-report screenshots, 10 MB for gear photos, 20 MB for moodboard PDFs), and compression happens automatically before the upload.

• Pick the file as normal. A large photo is re-encoded at the highest resolution that still fits — as WebP, or as JPEG in Safari and on iPhone and iPad, which cannot write WebP — so a 12 MP phone photo no longer has to be resized by hand first.
• Compression runs on your device and can take a few seconds for a 12 MP image — a short toast tells you it is working, then a second toast reports the before/after size.
• You will only see a size error now when compression genuinely cannot get under the limit, and the message states the actual size and the limit so you know how far off it is.
• Some file types cannot be compressed at all — CSV, ICS and ZIP imports, and SVG images. Those still have to be under the limit when you pick them.
• The stored file may have a different extension than the original (a .png you picked can arrive as .webp, or as .jpg from Safari or an iPhone). That is expected — the app names it after the format it actually wrote.

Factory Reset deletes every project, device, contact, template, setting, and backup stored in this browser, then reloads the app. Use it only when nothing else works.

• Read the warning twice. There is no automatic undo.
• If you use Cloud Sync, your data still exists in the cloud and will be downloaded again after you sign back in. Without Cloud Sync, a factory reset is permanent.
• Export a manual backup first from Settings → Backup & Data, even if you think the data is broken. A broken backup is better than no backup.

1. Go to Settings (sidebar → Support → Settings).
2. Open the 'Backup & Data' tab.
3. Scroll to the bottom — the reset action lives in the danger zone, separated from the rest of the page.
4. Confirm the dialog explicitly.
5. The app reloads itself empty. Sign back in if you use Cloud Sync to pull your cloud data back.

If nothing here helps, send a bug report. The more detail you include, the faster it gets resolved.

• Note your browser (Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Edge), its version, and your operating system.
• Write down the exact steps that lead to the problem.
• Press F12, open the Console tab, and copy any red error messages.
• Take a screenshot of the failure if it's visual.
• If you can, export a backup (Settings → Backup & Data) before doing anything destructive — that gives us a clean snapshot to reproduce against.

The version is printed at the bottom of the loading screen you see while the app starts — no need to wait for it to finish loading.

1. Reload the page (or reopen the app) and look at the bottom of the loading screen — the version reads like 'v1.31.1'.
2. Already past the loading screen? Open Settings → Support, where it is listed as App Version.
3. It also appears at the top of the in-app Documentation.

Bug reports are submitted from inside the app — no email, no GitHub account needed.

1. Open the sidebar and click Help.
2. Switch to the 'Support & Feedback' tab.
3. Use the form to describe what happened and what you expected.
4. Optionally attach a screenshot.
5. Submit. The report is delivered with the app version, your browser info, and recent error logs already attached — you don't need to copy them by hand.