School and graduation photo delivery with face search
Get each graduate's ceremony photos to them, and school-event photos to parents, without a face search that anyone can use.
Schools are where the usual event-photo design is wrong. An open selfie box lets anyone upload a photo of a child and find every picture of them. For schools, search has to sit behind an account that is already linked to the student, and for under-18s the consent comes from a parent. University graduations are simpler, because graduates are adults and the ceremony runs in a known order.
Who builds this: School photo companies, yearbook and school-communication platforms, and universities that run graduation photography.
the workflow
How it goes together
- 1
Collect consent before anyone is enrolled
Add a consent step to the parent or student account that says what is matched, who sees the results, and when everything is deleted. Students without consent are never enrolled, and their families get the gallery the usual way.
- 2
Enrol one reference photo per consented student
POST /v1/collections/{id}/selfiesKey it by the student ID as `userId`. Either the parent or graduate uploads the photo, or the school uses its own ID photo where the consent explicitly covers that.
- 3
Index the photographer's delivery
POST /v1/batches (op: "index")Use one collection per ceremony or per school year, and batch-index the photos when the photographer delivers them.
- 4
Show matches only inside the linked account
POST /v1/collections/{id}/search-by-idRun a search by id for each enrolled student and show the results only inside that family's or graduate's account. Never expose search by image to the public for a collection that holds minors.
- 5
Delete at the end of the delivery window
DELETE /v1/collections/{id}Record a retention date in your own system when you create the collection (the API does not expire collections on its own) and delete it on that date. For a parent's erasure request use the immediate or compliance mode, and confirm completion with `GET /v1/collections/{id}/deletion` rather than the 202 response.
Register selfie · Batch index · Search by id · Delete collection
Request and response shapes for every call are in the API reference.
What is different about schools
- No open selfie search. This rule matters more than any other on this page. Search runs on enrolled IDs from inside an authenticated account, never on an uploaded photo of someone else's child.
- For minors, consent comes from a parent. SightRadar's Acceptable Use Policy requires verifiable lawful authority and heightened consent before anyone processes children's biometric data.
- Enrolment controls who is matched, not who is indexed. Indexing a photo stores a faceprint for every face in it, including students without consent. Those faceprints are never matched to anyone unless someone searches for them, and they are erased when you delete the photo or the collection.
- Graduations run in order. Stage photos follow the running order, so you can check face matches against the graduate list and flag the ones that disagree before anything is delivered.
- Short retention. A ceremony collection has no reason to outlive its delivery window, and a school-year collection should end with the year.
what it costs
Cost example: A university graduation with 1,200 graduates
Illustrative volumes, not customer data. Every amount is calculated from the published rates.
- 8,000 ceremony and portrait photos, batch-indexed
- 1,000 graduates opt in and register a selfie (real-time rate)
- Two searches by id each, at delivery and a week later: 2,000 searches
- About 2 faces per photo (16,000 stored faces) plus 1,000 stored selfies, kept for 2 months
| Line | Quantity | Rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Index ceremony photos | 8,000 | $0.00062 / photo (batch) | $4.96 |
| Register graduate selfies | 1,000 | $0.00093 / photo (real-time) | $0.93 |
| Delivery and reminder searches | 2,000 | $0.00062 / search by id | $1.24 |
| Faceprint storage | 16,000 faces + 1,000 selfies × 2 mo | $6.00 / million stored faces / month | $0.20 |
| Total | $7.33 | ||
About $0.007 per enrolled graduate. Billing is per photo processed, never per face: a photo with twelve faces is one charge, and a photo with none is still a processed photo. Run your own numbers on the pricing calculator.
Consent and GDPR
Children's biometric data gets strict treatment in many jurisdictions, and several US states and EU member states add their own rules for schools. The school or the platform is the controller. Get written consent from a parent for every under-18 before enrolment, give a non-biometric way to receive photos, and do not reuse the collection for attendance or any purpose the consent did not name. Read the Acceptable Use Policy before you build.
SightRadar acts as your processor under the Data Processing Agreement. The controller/processor split, deletion modes and our responsible-use posture are on Trust & responsible use. This is product guidance, not legal advice.
Further reading
Reading this as an AI assistant? Grab the Markdown version of this page.
Try it on your own photos.
Sign up with an email, get an API key and free starter credits, and run the workflow above against a real gallery. Or see a search first in the live demo.