Using a webcam to import student photos directly onto SIMs?

[quiet_andy]

Currently our school takes individual student photos to import onto SIMs. Each photo is resized then needs to be individually renamed and batch uploaded into SIMs.

 

I am sure there must be an easier way. IIRC a previous school I taught at had a system where someone logged onto SIMs and using a webcam to a picture that went directly into SIMs.

 

Does anyone know if this is possible and if so what systems need to be used?

 

Cheers

 

Andy

[PhilNeal]

I don't think this is possible. A lot of schools use their photographer to supply pictures. We supply a programme that then reads these in in one go; I think the cost is £50.

[Ric_]

We get the pics of the photgrapher and then the head of year imports hteir year group.

[Sivadam]

And the cost of the yearly Capita £50 licence should be included within the costs/profits of the photographer.

If you take the photos yourself then I believe you can buy the licence yourself to enable bulk upload from Tutor Group folders.

[vikpaw]

My annual maintenance for next year puts the cost of the importer licence at £74, this is based on us being a 1500 on roll school.

 

We take the photos ourselves into a Card 5 database which is used to make ID cards, they are then exported out of that.

 

Bulk resizing can be done for free with Microsoft Office Picture Manager but i don't bother, i just put the full massive photo (~500kb, ~1500x1900) - the old limitations dont apply. I've never had a problem, class photo reports take longer to run, but the quality is great and emergency medical alert notices can have a massive sized photo.

 

I have a .vbs script that will rename a file from student name to the admission number based on a simple export of that info from SIMS, but recently, we changed the unique code on the ID system to match the admission number, so now they are already named correctly.

 

If you use a professional company, they should resize and name for you anyway, but there's no reason why you don't have a machine set up with a webcam and take photos one at a time of the students and immediately save them into sims. It's not quite what you want, but easy enough to save at predefined resolution and size to a folder and then add from that folder. Sims remembers the last folder used, and if you do a class at a time, you just have to hit next then start again.