The lab tool that composited school portraits into yearbooks, class composites, and ID cards — at lab scale.

Five tabs, the whole lab workflow

A database-driven Adobe InDesign companion, built for the lab floor.

EZ-IMAGE pulled the customer database, the student-portrait inventory, and the InDesign production layouts into one Windows-desktop tool. Lab operators picked the source records ("all of Order_Id TESTNEW, sorted by Last_Name"), picked a template, picked a destination folder, and the application emitted a full set of InDesign-ready composite pages — or batch-processed the underlying images in a single pass first. The five tabs across the top of the screen mapped 1-to-1 with the lab's production steps.

• Source Information — query the lab databaseDatabase-driven from day one. The screenshots show EZ-IMAGE connected to an EZLAB2K database, pulling from a `tbl_Customers` customer table with selection criteria (e.g., `Order_Id = TESTNEW`), sort orders, and image-tag mapping by Subject_Id. Operators picked the records once; the tool drove every downstream step.
• Composites — class composite pages, 25×25-readyConfigurable page layout for class composite pages: page width / height (inches), top / bottom / left / right margins, white-space ratio, number of columns, number of rows (the tab shows 25 of each — i.e., up to 625 portraits per composite), 4-line title text blocks (row / column / column-width per line), caption fields tied to database columns (First_Name, Last_Name), font size, oval vs. rectangular crops, and even-row shift for school-portrait aesthetics. Size / Preview / Build action buttons emitted the finished composite into InDesign.
• Process Images — batch processing, lab-scaleBatch processing across the entire image inventory: resize (percentage), crop, rotation angle, sharpen, contrast, gamma correct, deskew, despeckle, flip, invert, stretch intensity. Save-as a configurable format (PNG visible in the screenshot; other formats supported). The lab's full image inventory could be re-processed in a single pass with consistent parameters across thousands of images.
• Templates + Directories — production reuseLayout templates the lab built once and reused across every school job: composite pages, yearbook layouts, ID cards. Directories tab navigated the lab's network image storage so a job's images could be found wherever they sat — no hard-coded paths, no per-job re-import.
• Yearbook layouts, ID cards, and beyondThe same source-data + template + layout pipeline that emitted class composites also drove yearbook pages, school ID cards, and the rest of the lab's digital products. The template system was the unit of reuse; the underlying data + image-processing engine stayed constant across product types.
• Built in Visual Basic 6 + LEADTOOLSNative Windows desktop application built in Visual Basic 6 with LEADTOOLS 10 imaging and an Access/Jet database reached over ADO/ODBC. The second generation drove Adobe InDesign 1.0 directly over COM automation; the first generation emitted layouts through PowerPoint 97. Designed for the high-throughput lab workstations of the late-1990s school-photography industry.