We've been doing video capture work since DOS. It's gotten fairly easy compared to then.

Depending on the quality you need, I'd investigate USB cameras first. We use off the shelf cameras from Kodak and Intel that cost less than $100 and take great pictures up to 1024x768. These cameras do not have fancy lenses, so not much in the way of zoom, etc... If it works for your application, it's cheaper and easier to install than a capture card.

Next, I'd invest in a product like ImageExpress from www.pegasustools.com. You can do a lot of the same stuff with the Kodak tools that come with Win98, but this product has far more feateures AND you get support.

Use the MCI (windows imaging devices) interface when possible, it's newer technology than TWAIN and it tends to be quite a bit faster.

Given a working camera and this toolkit, you should be able to capture the images you need by Monday.

As for storage, I'd use MSDE (Free SQL server for up to about 5 connections) for this particular app and store the images in an image column. The easiest way I've found is to create the table in MSDE create a new, empty .DBC and create a remote view to the table. I hate remote views with a passion, but they do give you one great feature you can't get anywhere else, which is data type mapping between the local cursor and the remote database table. Change the data type for the image column from General to Binary Memo. Now, to put the picture in, use APPEND MEMO OVERWRITE or FILETOSTR() and to get it out use COPY MEMO or STRTOFILE().

MSDE can handle the size requirements for many years and it will be much faster at retrieving your photos than using the windows file system.

Best of luck,
Mike