Abstract There have been many attempts to accurately describe the photochemical processes that take places in photopolymer materials. As the models have become more accurate, solving them has become more numerically intensive and more ‘opaque’. Recent models incorporate the major photochemical reactions taking place as well as the diffusion effects resulting from the photo-polymerisation process, and have accurately described these processes in a number of different materials. It is our aim to develop accessible mathematical expressions which provide physical insights and simple quantitative predictions of practical value to material designers and users. In this paper, starting with the Non-Local Photo-Polymerisation Driven Diffusion (NPDD) model coupled integro-differential equations, we first simplify these equations and validate the accuracy of the resulting approximate model. This new set of governing equations are then used to produce accurate analytic solutions (polynomials) describing the evolution of the monomer and polymer concentrations, and the grating refractive index modulation, in the case of short low intensity sinusoidal exposures. The physical significance of the results and their consequences for holographic data storage (HDS) are then discussed.