A few parents at our school have asked when we would update the photos of their children. Some also mentioned that it would be nice to have access to older pictures as well.
Currently we have never updated any photos. We are using Gibbon for less than 2 years. Therefore the photos are rather recent but I believe more parents may complain as we go.
Currently we only take photos of staff and school kids but it is planned to extend this to all users. Anyway, it’s more of an issue with photos of school kids and currently we take those when the kid is enrolled.
School administration had a discussion about this topic and it was agreed that we should find ways to update the pictures every 2-3 years.
How do you go about it at your school?
Is Gibbon able to come in and assist in some way? I was thinking of a query that is able to list older photos.
This topic may be more of a brainstorming nature to find a way that can work for my school. It also has to do with school administration and goes beyond Gibbon I guess.
For our school, we take photos two times: first when the student is enrolled the IT staff will take their photo as part of their student ID, and this gets bulk-uploaded. This is generally the first couple weeks of school. Then, later in the year there are professional photos taken of the whole school, which we collect up and bulk-upload based on usernames. This tends to ensure that photos are only ever about 1 year old, and that each student always has a photo.
If you’re looking to write a query for the photo uploaded date, because the photo URLs are saved relative to the uploads folder, you could possibly extract the month and year from that URL and use it to sort & find students needing new photos. Or event just sort your student query by image_240 ASC which should give you the oldest photos first.
I wonder if it’d be useful to have the relative date of a user’s photo available on hover, to make it easier in the profile view to see when the photo was last taken as well.
We didn’t have the need for a student ID so far. I think it’s also because our kids wear a unique school uniform making it clear to everybody where the kid belongs to and the school is rather small with fewer than 400 kids so everybody basically knows everybody. I know it’s out of topic but why do you have student ID’s in your school?
To extract the date directly from the url sounds interesting. How is this done and can I do this directly inside the query builder?
I think our student IDs are mostly used for printer access and checking out books in the library. Otherwise, yep the students are pretty identifiable by their uniforms. We also have to submit the student photos yearly to the local education board, so it’s become a part of the school year routine here.
If you’re using the default URLs based on year & month that Gibbon generates for user photos, then a query string like SUBSTRING(gibbonPerson.image_240, 9, 7) as `User Photo Date`` could give you the YYYY/MM value, and then sort & filter your query from there.
Sorry for the late reply. I haven’t checked replies for a few weeks. I just activated email notification forwarding. This should not happen again.
Thanks for sharing! I’m wondering and sorry in advance for bothering you with non-Gibbon-related stuff again. How does the student ID help with printer access and book check out? Is it that staff is asking for the student ID before a book is handed over to the student? How is the student ID used to access the printer?
I think the SQL query should work just fine. I’ll check that out later.
In the initial question I was also asking about a way to keep access to older photos. Is there an easy way to achieve this?
Hi Roman, I leave Sandra to follow up on printer and book check out.
For archiving, would it work to periodically export the current list of students, with the link to their image. You could then use a terminal script using something like wget to download and store all of these.
Longer term it would be nice to have some kind of photo archive system within Gibbon.
