One of the compelling and, occasionally, infuriating aspects of school communications is our need to keep up simultaneously with both the shiny fascination of the moment and the fascinations of yesteryear.

As communicators get familiar with artificial intelligence and reorganize their departments to produce more video content, our industry continues to wrestle with a more mature technology — digital photography.

These days, the difficulty takes many forms:

• Trying to successfully organize and maintain a useful photo library;
• Obtaining parental consent, and even student buy-in, for photos that promote the school online and in print;
• Determining whether cellphone pictures are now good enough to use with top-tier school marketing;
• Reckoning with AI’s ability to transform an innocuous photo into something scandalous; and
• Managing parents’ expectations of seeing their children often in school communications.

Each of these alone represents a potential headache and, perhaps, an issue to be managed by the communications director and other senior administrators. Collectively, though, they can become too much to bear.

Independent schools are overdue for a conversation about the purpose and demands of around-campus photography. We suggest that, as with other discussions around legacy communications tasks, the starting point should be, What can we let go of and stop doing?

Shallow depth of field

Photography frustrations were a common topic in the summer of 2025 at two conferences 1,000 miles apart — the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools’ annual gathering and Finalsite University.

At these professional development events, Fine Point heard communicators quietly voice the fear that photography feels now like a job on-campus staff can do … but not do well.

Optimism over the rise of photo-centric social media and “a phone in every pocket” has soured and waned, thanks to an endless list of shooting assignments and complaints from unhappy constituents with unfulfilled expectations.

Top-quality professional photography remains the preference for high-impact projects — the website, the magazine, the strategic plan.

Far less clear is the value of everyday photos that quite literally are here today, forgotten tomorrow. Yet such assignments keep on coming.

In Philadelphia and Orlando, communicators suggested that school photography has become a type of “busy work” akin to taking attendance, running a study hall or practicing fire drills.

Busy work has its place, to be sure — every campus needs accurate daily attendance — but it’s not the path to professional satisfaction. The frustration, we gathered, is contributing to staff burnout.

Lost in the photo archive

Separately, schools that take a lot of photos need a plan for organizing those files.

Plenty of campuses go with the “bucket approach,” where communications staff upload all their images to one repository — whether a private database for just the comms team or a public-facing site that parents can access, too.

But the bucket approach typically comes with a major drawback: It is onerous, and perhaps even impossible, to record (or “tag”) who is in a photograph and its context in a privacy-sensitive way.

Without such tags, a bucket can be hard to search efficiently. Going through thousands of photos to find just the right image is a huge time-waster.

Newer systems claim to address this problem, including Pixevety and Stockpress, and each had their advocates at last month’s conferences. Neither has established itself yet as the go-to industry solution, though.

Whose image is it anyway?

Schools must consider privacy issues any time a photo is posted or uploaded. Ultimately, students’ digital anonymity may be at odds with parental desires to see their children in class and at play.

Worse, the rise of AI deepfakes has heightened the risk for putting photos online. Schools’ opt-out forms may need a fresh look to consider whether parents are still appropriately informed.

Has your school reconsidered its photo policy in recent years, given the changing landscape? When and how do students have a say in the use of their image on the school’s behalf? Has your crisis team discussed the scenario of a deepfake based on one of your photos?

These questions are not simple for schools to solve. They won’t be addressed at all, however, unless you block out time to think and talk through the options and their ramifications.

This post is adapted from the July 2025 issue of Refill, published by Fine Point Communications.