Yearbooks are a cherished keepsake for students, documenting their school journey and capturing memories that last a lifetime. A significant aspect of creating a memorable yearbook is including high-quality candid photos of students and staff from school events throughout the year. Waldo Photos, a cutting-edge photo management platform, is playing a pivotal role in revolutionizing the way yearbook pictures are gathered, curated, and shared, making the yearbook building process more efficient, while allowing yearbook teams to build a more equitable and inclusive yearbook.
Streamlining the Picture-Gathering Process
Traditionally, collecting yearbook pictures involved an arduous task of sorting through hundreds or even thousands of photos to select the best ones for inclusion. This process consumed a considerable amount of time and effort for both school staff and students. However, with Waldo Photos’ innovative platform, this task has been streamlined, significantly reducing the time and effort required.
By leveraging facial recognition technology, Waldo Photos automatically matches students’ faces to the school’s event photos they’re found in, simplifying the process of collecting images for the yearbook’s candid photo pages. The technology even includes numbered jersey recognition for middle schools and high schools, where sports are a big part of the action photography, but faces are often obscured.
Increasing Content Contribution from the Community
All yearbook admins know a great yearbook starts with great content and Waldo offers a user-friendly interface for adding photos and videos via its 5-star rated iOS and Android apps as well as its mobile and desktop friendly web app. Inviting contributors via text or email is a breeze and Waldo allows administrators control over which photos are published. This makes it easy for students, parents, school staff, and outside photographers to access and contribute pictures for the yearbook, while providing the school complete control.
Building a More Equitable and Inclusive Yearbook
Waldo makes building a more equitable and inclusive yearbook, featuring the best candid photos of each student, a breeze. Waldo automatically sorts all candid event photos by student in the admin’s Student Dashboard. From there, admins can leverage two powerful algorithms built into Waldo’s Photo Manager, Best Matches and Auto-spotlights. Best Matches automatically ranks all of the photos a particular student appeared in from best to worst. Then, Auto-spotlights uses this ranking and allows admins to ask for a certain number of photos of each student, say 2, 3 or 4 photos each, to be marked as a Spotlight of that student. Then, the Spotlights grouping that is generated can be exported into your yearbook software program and administrators know all students will be represented in the yearbook equally.
Waldo Photos goes beyond providing admins a better, more secure tool for organizing yearbook pictures. It helps create a stronger school community as more memories are gathered and shared and families are able to enjoy viewing all the cherished moments made by their child during their time at school.
A Tool for Educating
Everyone’s photos contributed to the school’s gallery include photo attribution allowing yearbook administrators to see who contributed each photo. And Waldo’s school admin tool, Photo Manager, allows admins to filter photos by contributor. Additionally, private comments and replies can be attached to any photo being viewed, by either the contributor or the yearbook admin. This feature allows yearbook admins to provide instruction to each member of the yearbook team in real-time. This asynchronous instruction is a powerful tool for yearbook admins looking to help their students become better photographers.
Maintaining Privacy and Security
Waldo significantly increases a school’s security surrounding its photo and video content. Heralded as the “Fort Knox” of photos, Waldo has built a myriad of tools that allow schools to gather and share more content while ensuring everyone’s privacy is respected. It starts with photo moderation. Administrators are allowed to set photo moderation globally or at the contributor level. Any photos uploaded that are marked as “require review” will not be published until reviewed and cleared by the admin. Beyond photo moderation, the Waldo AI helps schools comply with important obligations surrounding their “protected students”. Waldo’s “Do Not Publish” feature cleverly uses its photo finding skills to find any and all photos featuring a protected student and expunges them from the gallery prior to their being considered for publishing. Every admins worst nightmare is having one of the sensitive photos slip into the yearbook and Waldo makes this a lot less likely.
For any school looking to build a better, more inclusive yearbook in less time, check out WaldoSchools.
