Recommend school photographers that cover the Thames Valley area

[AngryTechnician]

For years we've been using Tempest for our school photographs, but for the last two years we've been dissatisfied with the job they are doing, in particular the provision of JPEG photo thumbnails to load onto our MIS.

 

This year's had more than 1 in 10 photos assigned to the wrong child as a result of poor record keeping by the photographers on the day, which is also making it difficult for us to provide reference numbers to parents who lost the order form they got on the day.

 

Can anyone recommend a different school photography service covering the Thames Valley area that can not only provide MIS photos, but can also cope with the obviously highly taxing job of scanning the correct barcode on a class list?

[john]

We use them for ours but WE have to provide the person to scan the barcodes which I thought was standard across them to stop them getting the blame for miss-hearing little johnny or when johnny says he's fred as you are more likely to know that he's telling porkies from the pile of giggling kiddies around etc... Are you sure its not a member of your staff that fails to use the naff barcode reader wand they have?

 

Another firm is Gilman and Soames (spelt wrong no doubt) they can do MIS photos as well as the usual smile kiddies for the mantelpiece

[Jamman960]

We also used Tempest up until a few years ago, we now use Bentley Photographic - they seem to be getting most correct, only 5 wrong out of 300 last year. I imagine they'd cover your area.

 

They still send awful quality thumbnails on a dvd each year but generally send out better ones once I request them.

 

James

[AngryTechnician]

john, I checked personally this year and it is the photographers themselves doing the barcode scanning. We have 3 togs on the go at once, so I guess we'd have to supply 3 members of staff if we were doing it ourselves. Ours are always accompanied by their form or set tutor to keep the mucking about to a minimum, but I'm not sure I'd trust all of them to get it right either.

 

Another option we've considered is having the form tutor hand each child an individual card on the way in with their barcode on so they can't scan the same one twice on the sheet, which I think is what happened a lot this year. It's not so much the misidentified ones that are a problem, but we have about 30 kids who have no photo at all because their code was associated with a duplicate of another child, rather than them being swapped.

[john]

Wish they would scan ours for us were told its policy not to! Think when we start using them again I'll be bringing that one up as it costs us 3 or 4 staff each year which is not that helpful when were all so stretched.

 

The card trick is how its been done before by others, all pics are named 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc and the cards inserted into a special tin and that keeps them in the right order and works well just means you don't get the CD on the day.

[Soulfish]

We use https://www.successphotography.com. I've only dealt with them this year but we only seem to have 1 wrong photo.

[john]

We use https://www.successphotography.com. I've only dealt with them this year but we only seem to have 1 wrong photo.

 

Ahhh I can recommend the quality and professionalism of them, they took the degree photos of my Sister, and we have a brilliant photo of her and a lovely group one of me and the family by them so can commend that side of there work. MIS photos no idea however!