Photomaly Customers

The four values that actually fail an order

Format (portrait or landscape), print size such as 2x3, 3x4 or 4x6, print count, and output — colour or black and white. Each is checked separately, so a beautifully composed portrait at the wrong size is a rejected order, and so is a perfect print run of five when the slip said nine.

Format is the one you cannot fix at the printer, because it is decided when the shot is taken. Read the whole line before you pick the camera up rather than after.

Camera orders have a valid-shot rule

For a camera request the customer has to be standing on the marked spot, and you have to shoot in camera mode with the correct rotation — a green icon confirms the photo counts. A frame that is too zoomed in is worth retaking on the spot; it costs seconds now and a whole reprint later.

Once you know the shape of a request, the specific ones repeat often enough to be worth learning.

Group them by workflow, not by personality

Read the log column by column and the pattern is obvious: roughly half the requests are camera work where format and size decide everything, a third are drive jobs where the only real question is how many copies of how many files, and the rest are film that has to go through the chemicals before it exists as a photo. Sorting each arrival into one of those three buckets in the first sentence of dialogue is the single fastest habit on this page.

Editing is a courtesy, not a requirement

The photo viewer lets you adjust a shot before printing, and it is genuinely fun to hand someone back something better than they expected. It is also the fastest way to burn shift time on an order that was already acceptable. Edit when the framing needs it or when the customer's whole request is "make me look good", and print straight otherwise.

Delete the shots you are not selling

Bad takes pile up in the photo list, and later in the run that same list is where your anomaly evidence lives. A tidy list is how you avoid printing the discarded frame by accident when a customer is waiting. Keep the good shot, delete the rest, and check orders guide if the print setup panel is still confusing.

Reading requests correctly is the easy half. The hard half is what you say back.

Curiosity pays out through the camera

Nothing about a customer becomes useful until it is photographable. An odd request, an odd pose or an odd answer is worth nothing to your contact and nothing to the quota; a print with something in it that was never in the room is evidence. That is the whole design of the game's horror — you are rewarded for looking closely at the photograph and punished for saying it out loud at the counter.

So the practical answer to "how far" is: as far as the lens reaches, and no further than the counter conversation.

Strange is not the same as reportable

Plenty of customers are simply odd. A man wants a photo for a wife he may never see again, a woman needs proof she shows up on film at all, someone leaves without a word. None of that is an anomaly on its own. Serve them, print what they asked for, and let the developed frames tell you whether there was actually something there.

Meanwhile the clock has not stopped, which is its own problem.

Customer arrivals are also your anomaly timer

New anomalies tend to appear around customer activity — an arrival at the counter, or that customer stepping into the photo room to be photographed. That makes every greeting a free cue to sweep the security camera feeds afterwards, which is far more efficient than checking on a whim. The full sweep routine lives on the anomalies page.

The last surprise is what lands in your hand at the end of an order.

Treat every oddity as an order first

The studio only breaks when you stop doing the job. Whatever the person in front of you turns out to be, the sequence is unchanged: read the request, fill it exactly, put it in an envelope, hand it over. Keep that intact and the strangest shift is still a profitable one — which is what funds the upgrades that make the remaining shifts easier.