For early-childhood centres and preschools
The pictures from your rooms are records of somebody’s three-year-old
Which is why they should not be living on four teachers’ phones, in a messaging group somebody set up in September, and in a shared drive nobody has audited since. Preschool Gallery keeps them attached to your own room list, shows each family their own child, and does not let any of it onto the open web.
Start with the question you were going to ask third
Every director we speak to gets to the same question eventually, and it is usually asked carefully, near the end: can we use the children’s photographs on our enrolment page?
No. Not from here, and not with a signed form from the family either. Every child in your building is under thirteen, and our system holds an under-thirteen child’s image back from the open web before it looks at what any adult agreed to. It is not a permission somebody forgot to switch on. It is a floor underneath the permissions.
We put that first because you deserve to know where the walls are before you like anything else about the product. If it is a deal-breaker, you have lost four minutes instead of a term. And if it is not, the rest of this is about doing the parts we can do properly.
There is a real enrolment gallery to build here, and it is a different one. Your rooms. Your garden. The equipment you spent the grant on. Your staff, with their own agreement. Photographs from an open morning where the families who came agreed in advance to that specific use.
That is a good gallery and most centres do not have one, because they have been filling the gap with pictures of the children instead. Separating the two is worth doing on its own merits, quite apart from anything a system requires.
Where your photographs are right now
This is not a criticism of anybody. It is just what happens when nobody decides.
On teachers’ phones
The largest collection, and the one nobody can produce on request.
Every room lead has hundreds of them. They are backed up to whatever personal cloud account that person happens to use, they leave with her when she leaves, and when a family asks for something from two years ago the honest answer is that it depends whether anyone still has that phone.
There is no villain in this. A teacher took a nice photograph of a child having a good morning, and the fastest way to get it to the parent was the phone already in her hand.
In a messaging group
Convenient, and the one most likely to be someone else’s child.
A room group chat sends every photograph to every parent in the room. That is fine right up to the family who did not want their child in anybody else’s camera roll, and by then the picture has been forwarded twice and there is nothing to withdraw.
The awkward part is that this is rarely discovered as a complaint. It is discovered as a quiet conversation at pickup that a director then has to have with a teacher she likes.
On a shared drive
The most organised option, and it still cannot answer the only question that matters.
A folder per room, a folder per year, and filenames from a camera. It is tidier than the alternatives and it holds files rather than records — so when a family withdraws a permission, somebody has to go and work out which files that touches, and the answer is always “probably most of them”.
A drive can be locked down beautifully and still not know which child is in which picture. That is the gap this product exists to close.
With the photographer
The professional sitting, held by a company you do not control.
Once a year somebody comes in, takes the portraits and takes them away. What comes back is prints and an ordering link, and the underlying frames stay with the studio under terms most centres have not read since they signed them.
You can keep your photographer. This is about the centre’s side of that arrangement: the list the day runs against, the match back to each child, and what happens to the pictures afterwards.
What being attached to a child actually buys you
Almost everything useful in this product comes from one unglamorous thing: a photograph is attached to a child on your own list, rather than being a file with a camera’s filename on it.
Once that is true, a set of questions that are currently hard become easy, and a set of promises that are currently made by a person get made by the system instead.
| The question you actually get asked | Files in a folder | Attached to the child |
|---|---|---|
| Can I have everything of my child from this year? | Somebody scrolls through folders | It is the ordinary thing the system does |
| We have withdrawn permission -- what now? | A search, and a hope | It stops applying the next time anybody looks |
| Who was not photographed at the sitting? | Count the files against the register | Your list minus the children with frames |
| Can a parent see another family's child? | Whatever is in the folder they were sent | Their own child, worked out when they ask |
| A teacher leaves. What goes with her? | Whatever is on her phone | Her access, and nothing else |
What is not switched on
Nothing here can be bought. There is no checkout, no price, no card form and no shop. Families cannot order prints through this today. That side of the product is being built and live payment is not turned on, which is a plain fact rather than a soft launch.
No AI decides anything about a child. Nothing sorts your pictures by looking at faces unless a parent has specifically switched that on for their own child, and for children this young we would tell you not to offer it. The ordinary way a picture reaches the right child is a lookup on your own room list.
We will not give you a compliance certificate. We will tell you precisely what the system does and refuses to do. Whether that satisfies your obligations in your state is between you and your own adviser, and any vendor who answers that question for you in a brochure is selling you something they cannot deliver.
Questions directors ask in the first ten minutes
Can we use the children's photographs on our enrolment page?
No, and this is the answer we would rather you hear from us now than from a parent later. Every child in an early-childhood room is under thirteen, and the system holds an under-thirteen child's image back from the open web before it even looks at what that family agreed to. A parent saying yes does not change it. What you can build instead is a proper enrolment gallery of your rooms, your garden, your equipment and your staff, plus photographs from an open event where the families present agreed in advance to that specific use. That is a real gallery and it is worth doing well.
How do parents see their own child and nobody else's?
A parent's access resolves to their own child each time they look, rather than pointing at a shared album. There is no address that works for whoever has it, so there is nothing to forward, nothing to screenshot out of somebody else's family, and nothing to switch off in a hurry if a family leaves.
Does this use facial recognition on toddlers?
Not by default and not unless a parent turns it on, and at this age we would tell you not to. The everyday way a picture reaches the right child is a lookup against your own room list -- a name and an id. Your staff already know who was in the room, so a face scan would be answering a question your list has already answered while creating a new problem for every family in the building.
What can a family buy?
Nothing today. Live payment is not turned on, so there is no checkout, no price and no card form anywhere on this site or in the family view. We would rather say that than describe a shop in the present tense and let you find out.
We are a small centre. Is this too much system for us?
Possibly, and it depends on one thing: whether your teachers' photographs currently live on their own phones. If they do, the honest work is not installing software, it is changing a habit that formed because the habit was easy. If you are not ready for that, a system that holds pictures nobody puts into it will not help you, and we would rather say so before you spend a term finding out.
The long version of the consent answer is on what we can show. What is actually in each collection is on the rooms.