The rooms
Six collections you already have, whether or not you have a system for them
Narrow them by who is allowed to open one, or by what genuinely works today. Then open one and read what it holds and where it stops. Every choice below is an ordinary link, so this works with nothing switched on and you can send anybody the exact view you are looking at.
Narrow it down
Who can open it
What we can actually do with it today
Showing 4 of 6 collections.
- Working today
The portrait sitting
The once-a-year sitting, run against the room list rather than against a stack of envelopes.
Who opens it. The family each child belongs to, and the staff at the centre. Nobody else can, and there is no link form that would let anybody try.
- Working today
The everyday pictures
The forty photographs a teacher takes in a week, and where they are supposed to go.
Who opens it. The family the child belongs to. A parent sees their own child. They do not see the room, the class, or somebody else’s child in the background of a good photograph.
- Working today
Milestones and moving-up day
Graduation caps that do not fit, a certificate, and the last day in the youngest room.
Who opens it. Each family, for their own child. A group photograph of a whole room is a special case, and it is handled the way group pictures are handled everywhere in this system: it is only shown to a family when every child in the frame is allowed to be shown to that family.
- Working today
The room record
Who was in the room, which is a records question that happens to involve pictures.
Who opens it. Staff, according to what each person is allowed to see. A room lead is not automatically an administrator, and an administrator is not automatically able to see another centre’s children — that wall is held in the database itself rather than in a screen, so a new feature inherits it whether or not the person building it thought about it.
The same six, laid against your year
An early-childhood centre does not have a September-to-June rhythm the way a school does. Children arrive in February and in July, a room’s composition changes every few weeks, and there is no single week in the autumn when the year’s photography happens. That changes which of the six matters when.
Continuously, all year. The everyday pictures and the record that ties them to a child. These are the ones that decide whether the system is worth having, because they are the ones that either become a habit or do not.
Once, at a fixed point. The portrait sitting. It is the only part of the year that looks like a school’s picture day, and it is the part a photographer usually runs. Everything useful about it happens before the camera arrives: the list it runs against.
At the ends. Milestones and moving-up day, which arrive whenever a particular child ages out rather than on one date. A centre with rolling enrolment has a moving-up day most months, which is precisely why holding these against a room list instead of a calendar folder is worth the trouble.
Whenever you are recruiting, which is always. Enrolment imagery. It is the one with the flat no, and the one that most needs a plan of its own.
How to read the honest edge
Every entry above carries a line we have called the honest edge. It is the part a brochure would leave out: what this collection cannot do, said next to what it can, in the same size type.
Some of those edges are temporary — families cannot buy anything today because live payment is not turned on, and that will change. Some are permanent by design: a room photograph is withheld from everybody when a single family in it has said no, and that will not change. We have not marked which is which with an icon, because the distinction deserves a sentence rather than a symbol, and every entry says plainly which kind it is.
If you read nothing else on this site, read the edge on the enrolment entry. It is the one that has ended conversations for us, and it is better read now than discovered in a planning meeting.
Why the outward column is empty, in one paragraph
Try the filter above: choose someone outside the centre and then working today, and you get nothing. That is not an oversight in our catalogue and it is not a feature we have not built yet.
It is the shape of the product for this age group. A child under thirteen is held back from the open web before the system looks at any permission at all, and every child in your building is under thirteen. So the outward door is closed, permanently, for the children. Everything else on this site is about doing the inward job properly.
The full version of that, including what happens to a group photograph when one family says no, is on what we can show.
What this catalogue is not
It is our description of our own collections, and it holds nothing about any child. There are no children’s pictures on this site, no example records, and no sample of anybody’s data. Nothing you type into the address bar reaches what you are reading.
We are describing what the product holds so you can decide whether it is worth a conversation. A demonstration against your own rooms is a different thing and it happens after you have talked to a person, not before.