Pholio · school photography
School photography, on our own private system.
The yearbook industry quietly turned picture day into a face-recognition data business — a child’s portrait uploaded to a vendor’s AI cloud, matched by biometric template, monetized far from the school. Pholio is built the opposite way: photos and face data are never sent to an outside AI or photo company — the editing and storage run on our own private system, facial recognition is off unless a parent turns it on, and a portrait is sellable only when permission allows.
No contract, no minimum order. Picture day, the directory, ID cards, and team composites all flow from the one consented student record.
Four things Pholio guarantees by architecture
No biometric template, ever
We never compute a face-recognition signature for a student. There’s no faceprint to leak, subpoena, or sell — because it doesn’t exist. Shipped
“Find my child” is a roster lookup
A parent finds their child by the school’s roster — name, grade, homeroom — a roster lookup, not a face match. It’s a database query the school already trusts, not a surveillance feature. Shipped
No outside AI or photo company
Photos and any face data run on our own private system. A portrait is never sent to a third-party AI service, an ad network, or an enrichment vendor — the editing and storage stay with us, not a data broker. Shipped
Consent gates the sale
A photo becomes purchasable only when consent on file says it may be — enforced in code, per subject; if consent is missing, the system blocks the photo by default, not by a checkbox someone might forget. No consent, no sale. Gate shipped Parent storefront in early access
How the private-system pipeline works
- Capture lands on our own private system. Picture-day photos run through our own isolated system. They’re never sent to an outside AI or photo company, copied to a shared model-training pool, or dropped in a vendor’s general storage.
- Identity is by roster, not by face. A photo is associated to a student through the same authoritative record the gradebook uses — so there’s never a need to run face recognition.
- Consent is checked before anything is sellable. The consent gate reads the consent record before a portrait can appear in a storefront. A photo without sale consent is simply not offered, and a do-not-publish or under-13 student is suppressed end to end.
- The school stays the controller. The school — not a photo vendor — remains the authority over its students’ images, and the same portraits flow straight into the directory, ID cards, and the yearbook.
Everything picture day needs, on one record
Portraits, composites & ID cards
Roster-bound portraits flow into directory pages, ID-card composites, sports and club team photos, and memory mates — all from the same record, with print preflight that blocks by default. Shipped
Consent-gated parent galleries
Guardians claim their student by a claim code or a roster match and see only their own child’s photos — a tenant-isolated, consent-gated gallery, never a vendor-wide pool. Galleries shipped Storefront in early access
A real school revenue leg
A portrait order settles on net and splits four ways — studio, photographer, school, and platform — on an exact-penny, append-only ledger, with the school cut in where incumbents give it nothing. Four-way split in early access
Honest on the money: the ledger routes a leg to the school and the order flips paid, but the school-leg payout wiring is the launch-critical fast-follow — we don’t claim dollars reach a school’s bank today.
However you run picture day
Run by your studio
A studio that owns picture day gets Pholio free, keeps the largest portrait leg, and runs its reps on an on-platform commission engine — plus a privacy advantage it can take to a district’s procurement office.
Run by the school
A school that runs its own picture day on our private-system pipeline keeps the studio’s leg too — for many schools, enough to fund the yearbook outright.
We’re honest about what’s shipped
The private-system capture pipeline, the consent gate, roster-lookup “find my child,” consent-gated galleries, team photos and composites, and the FERPA + rep PII walls are live today. The parent-facing portrait storefront and the four-way split are in early access — building now on the pipeline and gate you can already run — and the school-leg payout wiring is the fast-follow behind them. These describe what the platform does today; they are not a regulator’s certification, and the binding policy lives in-app.
Pholio is the school-photography brand from Stanley Studios — the same family behind Homeroom and the yearbook, one consented student record underneath.