Photos from Bromcom to to a folder

[mitchell1981]

Anyone know of a way to pull student and staff photos from Bromcom and into a folder? Ideally fully automated on a schedule. We used to use Sims Photo Exporter from Salamander previously, but they say they don't have a version for Bromcom.

 

I use this for a few processes in Power Automate and Power BI.

 

Thanks.

 

[Mike8080]

I'd like to know this too.

[Bromcom_Alastair]

Hi Mitchell1981 - I don't know of any off-the-shelf-products that could do this but you could feasibly create a scheduled report with the photos + a power automate process to push them to a local location?

 

It may also be worth asking Salamander if they plan to develop such a tool for systems beyond SIMS given the changes in the market.

Either way, if you have a case logged for this, drop me a message and I can see if I can get someone to assist you. 

[ThomL]

This should be doable with the Bromcom API and some scripting, in the documentation is a few lines explaining how to access the images. Do you have API access?

[KirstieCallaghan]

Peter Langford gave this method:

Not automated tho.

Also prompt was for keeping the UPN as the file name - adjust if you want to use a different identifier.

 

Native Bromcom you cannot, but you can do it another way, but the image quality will be lower.

Create a Quick Report on Students domain.  Include just the group UPN and Photo.
Important SORT IT by UPN or Group but you will need an order you can recreate later on.

Save the report

Now export as EXCEL file from within report writer.

Open Excel, remove the other data from the file i.e. the UPN and Group you do not need it, but leave the images.

Save this file.

Save it again, and here is the magic part ...  Save As HTML file.

This will create a subdirectory or all the images in the html file, labelled image001.png etc.

Now create a new EXCEL file.

This excel will rename the orginal name to new UPN, remember the sort order from earlier? Well use that here as the images extracted are in order of that sort order. Will leave you to work that part out, but then you end up finally with three columns in Excel

Original image name: New name : Command
Image001.PNG A123456UPN.PNG: Ren image001.png A123456UPN.PNG

Open command prompt, change to the directory you have images stored then copy the last column from Excel into it.

Sorted.

Edited April 30, 2025 by KirstieCallaghan
Fix

[Marci]

You can sign up (for free) for the Bromcom Partner API, which contains a personphotos endpoint with a base64 code per person matched on PersonID (generic for StaffID, StudentID, ContactID etc) which can be appended to the end of a URL to get to their photo.
Once you have that, you can use cUrl etc to knock up a batch command to download them all into a folder, or use the URLs direct in PowerBI to add photos into reports.

Edited April 30, 2025 by Marci

[mitchell1981]

Thanks all. Lots of good suggestions. I'll start with the API option, as that seems like the 'proper' way to do it, and I need to learn the API anyway.

[mitchell1981]

 

Hi Marci,

 

Thank you for your help on this. I've been playing with the API, and the Bromcom API Documentation page.

 

I've got as far as requesting the specific record I want, and it returns something like this.

 

How to I go from this, to a URL that actually shows the image?

 

{
  "page": 0,
  "perPage": 1,
  "success": true,
  "message": "1 record(s) fetched",
  "data": [
    {
      "personID": 327,
      "photo": "tc4CyTIc5z2p7pnNcasOl18PDCzY1WLk6xNWf46YHxI=",
      "dateTaken": "2025-03-05T00:00:00"
    }
  ],
  "errors": null
}

[ThomL]

I think you can now take the value from the "photo" key and append to the following URL to access the photo: https://Cloudmis.Bromcom.com/Nucleus/Framework/Components/Controls/ImageDisplay.ashx?EncID=XXXXX

 

Using your example, the URL to access the photo would be:

https://Cloudmis.Bromcom.com/Nucleus/Framework/Components/Controls/ImageDisplay.ashx?EncID=tc4CyTIc5z2p7pnNcasOl18PDCzY1WLk6xNWf46YHxI=

 

Doc says you have to access one at a time, you would cURL or WGET or similar to download as needed - OS/Programming/scripting language dependant

Edited May 12, 2025 by ThomL
More Info

[mitchell1981]

Brilliant. That worked. (I tweaked the code when I posted that, to avoid GDPR issues, but the real code works).

 

Thank you.

 

Where are you seeing the instructions by the way? I'm looking on the API Documentation page, and just seeing a long list of parameters and responses, but nothing like what you just posted.

 

[ThomL]

After logging in, there's the Getting started on the left menu, give that a click and on the page that loads there a menu near the top with a few examples of things. One of them is 'How to retrieve photos of students and staff' this is where I got the url 🙂

 

https://partner.bromcomcloud.com/getting-started

 

Not really instructions, more like a little snippet of info or a gotcha that happens to be exactly what you're trying to do. It's not like there's a load of different docs with helpful examples or explanations of the endpoints they make available.

Edited May 12, 2025 by ThomL

[mitchell1981]

Ahhh, thank you. A shame it's not a bit more comprehensive! Good starting point to work it out though. I've now got a Powershell script that will pull the student photo from their admission number. Going to try to get it working in PowerApps now.

[ROx]

Found a way to do it that doesn't involve the API.

If you export a report from bromcom to CSV that has photos in it, you will get the base64 string of the photos.

Use [System.Convert]::FromBase64String($base64string) to output it to a .jpg file.

You can use a powershell script to cycle through a long csv if you want.

 

Get Student Images from Bromcom.ps1