How do you organise photographs across school?

[Bev]

We take a vast number of photographs in school, and I try and keep them organised my school year, and year group. I have had some success with name-tagging using Picasa which is really useful when we do leavers assemblies and the Yearbook, but it doesn't cope well when I remove old photographs, leaving me with 100s of kids in my 'Persons' album who are no longer at school.

 

I'm wondering if anyone else attempts to organise the photographs or if it's a thankless task?

[localzuk]

Its a thankless task. We have a folder for photographs, organised by year, and then by event. So, we can narrow down like that but that's about it.

 

It makes it easy for us to comply with the whole "you have to delete photos when they leave" rules.

[Linfit]

This is a real bugbear of mine.

 

Yes, it is a totally thankless task.

I have just spent an entire weekend re-organising our staff shared area and trying to remove the thousands of photographs that have been dumped there - endless folders full of image_0001, image002, and on and on: no meaningful labels or dates, many of the kids in them no longer in school. They just create a random folder somewhere in their departmental area and copy the entire contents of the memory card (including any holiday photos, random pictures taken by their four year old in the back garden, and everything else).

Have now created a whole new file system on our SAN for photos and restricted them to one named folder: the idea is to lock it and archive at the end of the year and then create a new one for next year.

Trouble is, they will ignore it and just carry on dumping the stuff in their department areas.

[Bev]

We do have a reasonably good folder structure. One folder per year, and then each folder within that is labeled with the activity and the year group. Although there are lots of activities that cross yeargroups - yesterday's World Book Day photos will need to be kept for 4 years, so that when the current year 5s are leaving in Year 8 we can show photos of how cute they were dressed up in Year 5.

 

However, there are also lots of staff also have photos in their personal folders and on iPads etc which aren't kept centrally.

[SovietRussia]

Folders of events and subjects in the root, then you can drill down further sorting by date, i also try and rename photos to pupil names so Search is easier.

[dhicks]

I'm wondering if anyone else attempts to organise the photographs or if it's a thankless task?

 

It's an issue that we, you, and many other schools seem to have. The solution used in other industries is a media asset managemnt (MAM) system of some kind, although there doesn't seem to be such a system designed specifically for schools. I am working on my own solution, but finding time to actually work on this is proving difficult.

 

Edit: we've recently bought a bunch of compact cameras and Eye-Fi cards (around £100 per camera plus card, in the end), so now teachers simply take a photo and it goes straight on to a network share via our managed wireless system. It seems to work very well, although we've only covered two year groups. Photos are organised by classroom and then by date (one folder per day), which is at least a starting point for keeping things organised.

Edited March 7, 2014 by dhicks

[featured_spectre]

All got sorted by date-year, then sorted by event, and then sorted by year group (where multiple year groups involved, they go into the highest year group)

[hardtailstar]

Photos -Year group - Class -Event

 

If its a mixture of Classes then just Photos - Year group -Event

 

If whole school event then Photos- Event

 

It seems to work at the moment

[PotNoodleTech]

Badly.

 

It doesn't matter what type of structure I create they just shove stuff anywhere they like. I do tidy it up once a year.