The application that launched Redmer Software Company — and the company lineage that became A1SI.

On the studio floor

A scanner-and-camera workflow that shipped millions of portrait orders.

EZ-SNAP ran on the Symbol PDT 3100 handheld scanners that portrait photographers and lab operators carried at the studio. At each roll setup the operator scanned the session context once — customer, photographer, lights, camera, twin-check, magazine, work type, job — and then, as each subject sat for the camera, scanned the subject card plus the product codes for their package, and EZ-SNAP fired the Camerz Z-II itself for the correct shot. The pre-digital photographic-processing industry ran on barcoded paper workflow; EZ-SNAP put that workflow on a handheld, wired it into the camera's trigger, and made it audit-traceable.

• Camera order entry on a handheldOperators captured the photo-order package — subject ID, package code, photographer, session — on the scanner screen instead of on paper. The handheld kept the operator's hands free for the camera; the data landed in the order file the lab needed for fulfillment.
• Symbol PDT barcode scanningEZ-SNAP drove the Symbol PDT 3100 (Series 3000) scanners directly. One ROLL SETUP scan sequence per film segment captured the full session context — customer, photographer, lights, camera, twin-check, magazine, work type, job — then each exposure took a subject-card scan plus up to ten product codes. The scanner replaced a clipboard, a paper order form, and the inevitable transcription errors that came with both.
• Olan Mills, American Family Photographers, and moreRedmer Software Company partnered with several of the largest photographic-processing and school-picture companies in the United States during EZ-SNAP's 1997–2001 era. Olan Mills and American Family Photographers were among the named customers; the platform ran across many other regional labs and portrait studios.
• Order traceability before "audit trail" was a wordEvery exposure EZ-SNAP captured carried its subject ID and product codes, tied to a roll setup that named the customer, photographer, camera, magazine, and twin-check — with a timestamp per roll setup — so the lab could trace a finished print back to the original sitting. That same discipline (barcoded subject, traceable workflow, audit-friendly capture) shows up two decades later in A1SI's 21 CFR Part 11 work for medical-device tracking.
• Microsoft C/C++ 8.0 · NMAKE · ezsnap.exeBuilt with Microsoft C/C++ 8.0 and NMAKE for the Symbol Series 3000 runtime — a DR-DOS environment on the terminal. `BUILD.BAT` in `Src/` produced a deployable `ezsnap.exe` that operators transferred to the scanner. Scanner-screen forms-and-messages were the operator UI; data files on the scanner buffered the day's orders until the device was docked back at the lab, where the EZ-LINK Windows host application received them and EZ-INFO (Access 97) printed the barcoded camera cards the workflow scanned.
• It fired the camera, tooEZ-SNAP wasn't just order entry standing next to the camera — it replaced the Camerz Z-II's trigger and fired the camera itself, with an electrical control-line pulse through a two-pin AMP cable, powered by the terminal's NiCad battery. The User Guide's own framing: an "intelligent camera trigger." No scan, no shot — the order data and the exposure could never drift apart.