From our picture days · 25 September 2026
Send the school its files
before anyone asks.
Picture day is one day in September. The galleries close in October. And the school is still emailing us in March for one more thing. So now we make everything a school is going to ask for from one GotPhoto export, the day after the coupon closes, and send it before the first request comes in.
By Amy Gray, Patriot Photo Collective, San Diego.
Westview Elementary/
Teachers/
Mrs. Johnson/ Emma Smith.jpg ...
Mr. Patel/ Liam Kim.jpg ...
Yearbook/
Index.txt
Emma Smith.jpg ...
Office/
104417.png at their size, by ID
104418.png ...
The problem
The requests come one at a time.
If you photograph schools, you know how the year goes after picture day. First the teachers call: they want photos of their class for a classroom craft. Then the office manager emails, because they want photos for the student files, and those have to be PNG files at one exact size, each one named with the student's ID number. Then the yearbook person gets in touch and asks for the PSPA file, set up just so.
None of those is a big job on its own. But each one means finding the job again, exporting again, remembering how this school wanted its files last year, and renaming a few hundred photos. A school we photographed on one day in September, with the galleries closed in October, is still pinging us in March for one more thing. We were always a step behind, answering an email we could have seen coming.
What we do now
One export, every folder the school needs.
With School Packs, we ask GotPhoto for one export and make every file the school is going to want from it. The export is the PSPA student data export at the largest size, with the student data CSV included. We drop it into School Packs and it writes a folder for each thing the school asks for:
- For the teachers, a folder per teacher, full size, every photo named with the child's first and last name. That covers the craft projects, the bulletin boards and the welcome-back slideshow.
- For the yearbook, the photos with the PSPA Index.txt the yearbook software reads, exactly the way it expects them.
- For the office, the photos their student records system imports, at its size, in its file type, named by student ID. There are presets for RenWeb/FACTS and Synergy, or you set the size, file type and file name the school asked for once, and School Packs remembers it for that school.
It saves straight into the school's shared Google Drive folder, or as one .zip to send. Next year, and after makeup day, it is the same two clicks.
Want to see it on one of your own schools first? School Packs has a free 30-day trial: sign up with your email address and the key comes by email. It is the whole app, not a sample, so you can deliver a real school with it.
When we do it
The day after the coupon closes, and we're done.
Instead of feeling behind, get ahead of the game: send the files before anyone asks for them. We do ours the day after the GotPhoto coupon closes, which is the same day the yearbook pose selection expires, so the yearbook poses are settled. We make the export, run School Packs, and send the school one link.
The teacher who was going to call about the craft already has the class photos. The office manager's PNGs are already named and sized. The yearbook adviser's PSPA set is already in the folder. When makeup day comes around, we drop the makeup export in on top of the first one, the new photos go in, and we send the same link again.
That is the end of it. No email in March.
The same export
One download for the rest of the school's list, too.
The export we pull for School Packs is the one the rest of the ClassPhoto Suite already reads, so the same download does everything else the school orders:
- Class photos in ClassPhoto, every class composite plus the whole-school composite.
- ID cards in ClassPhoto IDs, student and staff cards with barcodes that scan.
- Service stickers in ServiceStix, one photo sticker per student on the label sheets the office already buys.
- Mug books in Principal's Book, the bound directory the front office keeps on the counter.
One export from GotPhoto, and every piece the school needs comes out of it. School Packs comes with every ClassPhoto Suite license at no extra charge, and you can try it free for 30 days first.
The tools this came out of
School Packs
Free with the Suite, or free for 30 days
Teacher folders, the yearbook set and the office's files, from one GotPhoto export.
ClassPhoto
$89/year
Class composites and a whole-school composite from the same export.
ClassPhoto IDs
$59/year
CR80 student and staff ID cards with barcodes that actually scan.
ServiceStix
$49/year
Service sticker sheets, one photo sticker per student.
Principal's Book
$79/year
The bound whole-school mug book for the front office.
All five, plus School Packs: ClassPhoto Suite, $199/year introductory.
Also from our studio: Ruler, a separate Mac app that batch-crops a picture day so every face comes out the same size. It has its own license and is not part of the Suite.