Office 365 Student Pictures

[atfnet]

Does your school put pictures of students on 365 user profiles (internal access)? (Please only reply if you use office 365)

Edited March 28, 2025 by atfnet

[6Foot2]

I voted "Yes", although I'm not sure if it's still the case.

 

Admin staff also used to print student images and mount them in a ring binder to act as a photo ID/rogue's gallery for when students misbehaved. 

[Norphy]

I tried this at a school I worked at a few years ago. It did not go well. 

 

There were a lot of complaints from the students because they didn’t like the picture we used (it came from the MIS system, it was their student ID photo).  The main issue however was that it massively increased bullying as the less pleasant part of the student body were taking screenshots of the photographs of the students they wanted to victimise and doing god knows what to them. We had to ditch them over to the school logo. 
 

Which was a shame, as the teachers liked it as they found it easier to identify students. 

[Oaktech]

School logo with the child's year group number behind it here. 

 

As far as we know, nobody went as far as @Norphy's students, but there was enough moaning both from Students and parents that we gave up and designed something else. 

 

Which, for the record, was something I told SLT would happen.

 

Sometimes they have a touching, if misplaced faith in the 'better nature' of students.

[mthomas08]

We did at one point, then turned it off.

[CHiLL]

Up until very recently, not many students knew how to change their profile picture, but we recently changed from A1 to A3 licensing, which also changed the default landing page of M365, which provided easier and more obvious access to change profile pictures. We started seeing student use inappropriate profile pictures (nothing graphic, etc). Since it's impossible to prevent users from changing their profile pictures, we spoke with SLT and they agreed to setting the profile pictures as their student photos from Bromcom, along with banning the URLs to change profile pictures while in school (obviously we cannot stop it on non-school devices). We instantly received a lot of complaints from students and SLT promptly asked us to remove the pictures, as students were concerned they'd be screenshotted, edited and shared around (fair enough concern).

 

We are leaving the URL blocks in place and students are aware not to change their profile pictures. Any student that changes their profile picture will have it changed to their student photo and updated every minute via MgGraph.

[colly72]

CodeTwo have a nice free tool, that can be used to bulk edit/manage O365 photos:

 

https://www.codetwo.com/freeware/user-photos-for-office-365/

[Sylv3r]

We used to add the staff (never student) photos, but we found a lot ending up on social media photoshopped onto other random bodies !

 

With the recent additional tools within AI - that probably would cause more issues now then previously. We just go with School Logo's now.

 

[pete]

We don't, for basically the reasons @Norphy and @Oaktech mention and we only take individual school photos of students in Years, 7, 9 and 12.

 

 

[Olliedawg]

Used to, don't anymore for reasons already stated above. We also removed staff photos.

 

We now use separate generic images for staff/students. They were ending up on social media (tiktok..)

[psydii]

Periodically people complain about something. I email SLT to ask them how I should prioritise it given project x, y  or z that they already have me working on.  The pictures remain.

 

We do reset student pictures to those from the MIS periodically, and any really inappropriate ones get reset immediately with sanctions.  If they 'just don't like it'  then re-shoots are done promptly.

 

But then again we also don't shy away from Job Titles or Teacher's first names in the address book either since if there is nothing special about knowing a teacher's first name, it holds no power, and does not impact behaviour management. Students don't, and by cutlure here shouldn't, use a teacher's first name when talking to our about them. Seems to work just fine.

[mdrabble]

Use the school logo on all users (staff and Students)

[pete]

2 hours ago, mdrabble said:

Use the school logo on all users (staff and Students)

We did think about that, then we thought sooner or later scammers will do it, so didn't want people to blindly assume "school logo = school person".

[DrCheese]

We have them on ours.

But students can't email each other (Only Teachers) or chat on teams so it limits abuse.