Latent
Software for film labs
Latent gives every roll a label, attaches the scanner export to the right order on its own, and hands the customer one page that holds their scans — and does not expire.
No card. Nothing to install. It runs in the browser you already have open.
labs that say on their own website how they send scans do it with a link somebody builds by hand — WeTransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive. Several say the link dies in a week. Counted across 56 lab websites, September 2026.
Steps 4 and 5 are the ones this exists for · mail-in works end to end, tracking in and out
Four tools, and none of them knows about the others.
The free tier does not expire, so there is no trial to forget about. A lab running 300 rolls a month turns over roughly $4,800 of developing — $29 is about half a percent of that.
Then you are ahead of almost every lab, and this is not a pitch for status tracking. The part that is still outside the system is the handover: the scans leave as a link somebody makes, separate from the order they belong to. That is the half Latent is for. If you have solved that too, I would rather hear it than not — it is the thing I am trying to find out.
One habit, once: the label prints a seven-digit job number, and you type it into the machine where you already type an order number. Then drop in the folder your Noritsu or Frontier writes and the files find their own roll. The last digit is a check digit, so a number typed wrong is refused rather than quietly matched to somebody else. Anything still ambiguous is listed for you instead of being guessed — the wrong scans reaching the wrong customer is the one mistake this trade cannot afford. Keep your own numbers instead if you would rather; it matches on those too.
They are deleted on a schedule you set, 90 days by default, with a warning before. You are the controller and we are the processor: there is a data processing agreement, the sub-processors are listed, and an open dispute stops any deletion.
Yes, both directions. A roll can be marked as on its way to you, and the turnaround clock only starts when it lands on your bench. It is not finished until the negatives have a tracking number going back.
All of it, with the limits each process actually allows — C-41 pushes two stops, black and white three. Pull costs what push costs, because it is the same tank.
No. It is a website. It opens on the shop laptop, on a phone at the counter, and on your customer's phone through a link. Add it to a home screen if you want it to look like an app — there is no store, no download, no update to chase. The one exception is the little watcher that reads your scanner's export folder; it reads and sends, and never writes anything back into your folder.
English · 日本語 · Deutsch · Français · Nederlands · Italiano · Español · Português
Set the lab's language once; a customer who gave us theirs is written to in it. Email only goes out in a language a person has proofread — the rest fall back to English rather than reach your customer in machine translation.