The order-entry application that upgraded EZ-SNAP from film to digital.

On the studio floor, in the digital era

Every picture, tagged at the camera and backed up before you finished the next shot.

SNAP rebuilt EZ-SNAP's studio-floor order-capture workflow on top of the digital-camera and Windows-XP stack of the early 2000s. The photographer set up the subject, the operator scanned the subject's barcode and picked the order package, the photographer pressed the shutter — and SNAP did everything else. Image pulled off the camera over Microsoft WIA, renamed with the job number / sequence number / subject ID / Kodak DP-2 format, EXIF tags written with the subject and order info, second copy written to the flash card in the camera dock as backup-and-digital-film, line of text appended to the job's import file for the lab's legacy system. The photographer never had to think about the file system; the lab never had to ask which image belonged to which order.

• Microsoft WIA bridge — every popular cameraSNAP drove every digital SLR that shipped with a Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) driver — Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Fuji, Sony — through the same operator UI. The custom `WiaCalls.bas` module bridged Visual Basic 6 to the WIA API so the workflow stayed identical regardless of which camera the studio standardized on.
• EXIF tags bound to every imageAs each picture was taken, SNAP wrote the sequence number, the subject ID, and the order info directly into the image's EXIF tags using standard EXIF fields — permanently binding the metadata to the image at the moment of capture. Out-of-order images and out-of-sequence orders were no longer possible to mix up; the data traveled with the file wherever it went.
• Dual-backup, "digital film"Every picture was backed up to two locations simultaneously — the workstation's internal drive AND a flash memory card mounted in the camera dock. The flash card doubled as portable "digital film" the photographer could hand off, and as the disaster-recovery copy if the laptop got dropped in the parking lot.
• Four input modes, one operator UISubject ID, Product or Package #, and Quantity entry via keyboard, barcode scanner, touch-screen, or mouse — the same operator workflow worked regardless of how the studio chose to identify the subject. Carried over the Symbol-PDT-era discipline from EZ-SNAP into the Windows-XP-on-a-laptop era.
• Disk space, managed for youAutomatic disk-space maintenance retained the maximum number of recent jobs within a configurable storage budget — no manual purges, no "my laptop is full at the worst possible moment" failure modes. On a standard early-2000s laptop, SNAP could hold more than 20,000 high-resolution images at once.
• EXIF for new labs, text files for old onesEXIF tags handled the modern workflow; a per-job text file linking job # / subject # / order info to the image filenames handled labs whose ingest pipelines pre-dated EXIF awareness. SNAP wrote both at the same time, so the studio could switch lab partners without changing how the photographer worked.