We all know school days are chock-full of memorable and unique moments. From the first day drop-off to graduation and everything in between – field trips, dances, sports, holiday plays, science fairs – the moments captured are endless. Compiling these moments into a cohesive, creative photo album takes time and effort but today’s cutting-edge technologies can let you focus on the fun and creative part without being mired in photo curating. Let’s get started with the complete step-by-step guide to creating a stunning school photo album.
Collect Photos from the School Year by Adding Contributors
Today’s cloud-based, app-friendly tools make gathering more memories from more of your community a breeze, without losing control over publishing. Check out a photo management app like WaldoSchools to simplify the crowdsourcing of photos from across your community into a single, secure, cloud-based repository. Platforms like WaldoSchools allow you to invite your school photographers, teachers, parents, and even your students as contributors and set access and publishing permissions for each. Once invited, they can upload photos directly through Waldo’s iOS or Android apps or via their desktop utilizing Waldo’s web app.
Waldo Photos will automatically add attribution to each photo uploaded so you know exactly who took each shot and can easily review and approve them by contributor. Since you have total control over managing these images, you can broaden the net and get as many community members to contribute to the school’s gallery without losing control over publishing.
Instead of having your photos scattered everywhere, they will be collected in a single, secure, cloud-based platform. It saves you time and effort that you would waste tracking photos from different sources after every school event. No more weeding through emails looking for attachments, chasing down text messages, or looking for SD cards.
The advanced AI technology designed by WaldoPhotos auto tags and recognizes faces to find photos of any student instantly. For sports photos where the face might be obscured, Waldo scans jersey numbers to make it easy to recognize and sort pictures of the athlete.
You don’t have to worry about running out of storage, as Waldo comes with 1 TB of cloud storage and additional storage can be added for a small monthly fee. The simple interface allows you to access your stored photos from any device with access to the web.
Organize and Select the Best Images
While Waldo makes collecting photos and videos from disparate sources a breeze and automatically organizes them by recognized person, you will likely want to further curate some of your photos with custom tagging. Custom tags like teacher, activity, course name, or grade level allow you to categorize the images based on any criteria relevant to your school. You can then use the search filters to quickly pull up photos from specific events or photos you’ve earmarked for special uses, e.g. social media.
As previously mentioned, the built-in AI tagging feature of WaldoSchools is a revolutionary tool that brings many benefits and changes how you organize and manage your photographs. However, Waldo’s custom tagging and search features also help you find very specific photos easily. You can use the combination of AI tagging and custom tagging to design an amazing photo album in significantly less time than in past years.
With custom tags, you can label a single photo, an entire upload, or the entirety of an album, based on the type of activity, location, event, or any keyword you choose. Once the tags are set, you can use custom search filters, such as AND/OR search, when multiple tags are involved, to surface the exact photo or group of photos you need. Waldo’s built-in “Spotlights” feature will select the very best photos of each student across your gallery. It allows you to export the “spotlight” photos and create a slideshow for your students that you know is balanced and contains the best images of each student.
While selecting photos for the album, you can tag your top images in Waldo to revisit later when designing layouts. The remaining photos of your students from school events can be shared automatically with parents through Waldo’s automated photo delivery. They will receive a fun text message or a notification via the app. It helps the parent enjoy the memories of their child’s school events in almost real-time. Add custom overlays to these images to promote your school’s brand.
Waldo also focuses on privacy when sharing these photos with built-in privacy and security tools to avoid unauthorized viewing of photos featuring protected students. You can use WaldoSchool’s proprietary “Do Not Publish” feature which will automatically tag and remove any photo featuring a protected student whose image you cannot share online. Waldo also allows parents to mark their student “No Post to Social” which will disable social posting of images featuring their student. Lastly, as mentioned above, Waldo’s “Require Review” status will allow you to vet all photos from designated contributors prior to their publishing.
Plan the Album Structure
Before designing the page layouts, it helps immensely to plan the narrative and structure of your album. It allows you to shape the photo selections and design around bringing out the overall story you want to tell.
Consider photos in a chronological order that follows the arc of the school year. Start with the first day, back to school, holidays, sports seasons, and significant events, and end with graduation. Don’t forget to intersperse school traditions like homecoming, etc, throughout the album.
You can also go for a thematic approach with sections dedicated to different aspects of the school. The app lets you arrange the album by daily student life, arts, athletics, or academic events. No matter how you want to plan the album’s layout, the custom tags from Waldo help you find photos seamlessly.
Utilize Waldo’s AI-powered Best Matches and Spotlights features to rank the quality of photos found for each student. The auto-spotlighting feature can automatically generate a specific number of spotlights for each student.
Design Eye-Catching Layouts
Now that the school photo album structure is planned and you have curated the best photos of each student, it’s time to focus on designing eye-catching page layouts. It is where you showcase your creativity and combine it into a unified memory book.
Decide on a theme and design language for the album. Get creative with asymmetrical collage designs featuring an arrangement of smaller photos. Use photo shapes like circles, hearts, and starbursts to add variety.
Incorporate contrast with landscape and portrait photos. Leave plenty of white space around and between photos to avoid clutter. Curate different layouts across album sections to keep things fresh and engaging. Consistent branding elements like colors, fonts, and logos visually tie the album together.
Combine your Creativity with AI
In summary, as you look to create a stunning school photo album that tells the story of a particular school event or the year as a whole, take advantage of the latest in cloud-based photo-sharing applications like WaldoSchools and the advanced AI that makes curating photos a breeze. With this legwork done by technology, you can focus on putting your own creative mark on your albums.
