For yearbook advisers and activities directors
Your editors are seventeen. Your senior portraits belong to somebody else.
Those two sentences are the whole difference between this band and every other one. A high school hands real responsibility to people who are themselves protected, and it needs pictures it does not own. Everything on this site follows from those.
The operator is also the protected party
An editor-in-chief with real authority over what goes in the book is, in a great many schools, sixteen or seventeen years old. That is not a problem to be engineered away — it is the point of a student publication, and a school that took it away would be running a newsletter instead.
What it does mean is that a system for this band has to hold two things at once. It has to give a student genuine authority over composition, selection and publication inside the school. And it has to stop that same student from being the person who sends a set of photographs of their classmates to somebody outside it.
So a minor holding a staff-like role is walled out of the outward operations before their role’s own permissions are even consulted. Not as a setting an adviser can adjust, and not as a matter of how sensible a particular editor is. It runs first.
This is a real constraint on your students and we would rather you heard it now. An editor cannot hand a set of images to the local paper, however senior they are.
Most advisers we describe it to say it matches what they already do informally. The difference is that it stops being a rule the adviser has to remember at eleven o’clock the night before a deadline.
What changed when they turned thirteen
Below this band, age does most of the deciding: an under-thirteen student is held off the open web before any permission is read. In a high school that rule barely fires, because almost nobody is under thirteen.
So the whole question moves to the family’s own permission — and it is worth knowing exactly how that behaves, because it is now doing all of the work.
| The question | How it behaves | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Is a student published by default? | No -- it defaults closed | A family that never answered is treated as not having agreed |
| Does an old agreement keep working? | Only while it is current | An expired agreement stops being a yes without anybody acting |
| When is it checked? | At the moment somebody asks | A withdrawal reaches a link shared last month, unedited |
| Who holds it -- the student or the family? | The family, because they are minors | It changes at college; it has not changed here |
| Does one refusal affect a group photograph? | Yes -- the whole frame is withheld | No crop, no blur. Plan your team pictures knowing it |
The four arguments a high school has every year
Not hypotheticals. These are the recurring ones, and a product that has nothing to say about them is a product that has not met a high school.
- The portrait the studio will not send
- The local paper wants Friday’s pictures
- A trusted editor wants to send something out
- The team photograph with one refusal
The portrait the studio will not send
A senior went to a studio of their own choosing and the book needs the picture.
The usual resolution is a chain of emails ending in a folder with no record of what was agreed, three weeks before a print deadline. It works, and it is also why schools have imagery in circulation that nobody can account for two years later.
The alternative is more work up front and it can be unwound: the studio is given a way to place an image, checked again every time it is used, that either of you can end.
The local paper wants Friday’s pictures
It arrives on a Saturday and somebody wants it answered by Monday.
The fast answer is a shared folder link, which then exists forever, works for anyone it is forwarded to, and cannot be reconciled against a family who withdraws in March. The slow answer is an arrangement that can be revoked and is verified on every use.
We are not going to pretend the slow answer is as fast. It is the one that can still be defended in the spring.
A trusted editor wants to send something out
And they cannot, regardless of how much you trust them.
This is the constraint most likely to annoy a good student, and the reason for it is not about that student. A school that permits it in one case has built a system where a minor can be the person who releases photographs of other minors, and the individual case is never the one that goes wrong.
What an editor can do is everything else: select, compose, caption, organise and publish inside the school.
The team photograph with one refusal
One family said no, so the frame does not go out.
Coaches ask whether the one student can be cropped or blurred. The answer is no, and the reasoning is worth having ready: a crop is a judgement made once by whoever was in a hurry, and a blur is a claim about a piece of software that the family has no way of verifying.
The practical response is to plan for it — a second frame taken without that student, agreed with them in advance, is a solution the family can actually see.
What is switched off
Nothing here can be bought. Live payment is not turned on, so there is no checkout, no price and no order form anywhere — not for a family, not for the school, and not for an outside studio.
No AI decides who appears. Nothing sorts your photographs by recognising faces unless a parent has switched that on for their own student, and it is never bundled into a publication permission.
We do not hold an outside studio’s library. Where a photographer owns the frames we point at them under an arrangement that can be revoked. Becoming a second copy of somebody else’s library is the thing that outlives agreements.
We will not certify you. We describe exactly what is blocked and when it is re-checked; the legal conclusion is yours and your district’s counsel’s.
What an adviser asks first
Our editors are seniors. Can they run the whole thing?
Almost all of it, and there is one deliberate exception. A student holding an editor role is still a minor, and the operations that send imagery outside the school are closed to them before their role is even consulted. They can compose, place, caption, organise and publish inside the school. Handing a set to the local paper is an adult's job. That is a constraint on your students and we would rather state it than have you find it at a deadline.
The senior portraits belong to a studio. How does that work?
By giving the studio a specific, revocable way to place an image rather than by collecting files. The access is checked again each time it is used, so if the arrangement ends the pictures stop being served rather than continuing to live in a folder somebody downloaded in October. It is more work to set up than an email and it is the only version of this that can be unwound.
What actually decides whether a student can be published now?
The family's own permission, held per student, defaulting closed, and re-checked at the point of use. Below this band the age floor does most of the deciding; here it barely fires, because most of your students are over thirteen. So the whole question becomes: did this family actively agree, and is that agreement still current?
Can a team photograph go on the athletics page?
Only where every student in it may be published. One family who said no takes the whole frame out, and there is no crop-or-blur option offered. A crop is a judgement made once by whoever was in a hurry; a blur is a claim about software that a parent cannot check.
Is any of this facial recognition?
Not by default and not unless a parent turns it on for their own student. The everyday way a photograph reaches the right student is a permission-checked lookup on your own roster -- a name and an id. It is deliberately dull, because the interesting version costs a stored biometric template for every teenager in the building.
The full account of giving access to somebody outside the school is on the outside link. What a high school actually holds is on collections.