Student Photos in Schoolmaster

Many schools use photos of the students in Schoolmaster. These photos must be converted into either Windows bitmap (BMP) files, or Macintosh picture (PICT) files. You may add pictures one-by-one to each student's record; in the Student file Primary Data view, double click the large rectangle and then select their picture file. However, this is too time consuming when loading photos in a large student body; this is where the photographer can help.

Most school photographers are equipped with computers and software that can create picture files for each student in the student body. Schoolmaster can generate a file that is used to associate each student's photo with his or her Schoolmaster identification number. This file could include a variety of student information for the photographer that will help to organize his/her work. To create this file go to Utility, Import/Export, Custom Data Export , Herff Jones Photography and click Edit. Click Filename to navigate to the desired folder path and type a filename or type the path and filename directly into the field. Click Export to create the file.

The file will contain each student's ID, name, homeroom number, homeroom teacher name and grade level; for most photographers this is more than adequate. Give the file to the photographer to use to create the picture files and the index file. The index file will be what Schoolmaster uses to match each student photo file with their information in the Schoolmaster database. This is done using Utility, Import/Export, Import Student Photos.

For the Photographer

The index file used for importing the photos into Schoolmaster is a text file with two pieces of information per record, the student ID and the name of the bitmap or picture file. The index file should be comma-quote delimited with a carriage return/line feed pair (CR/LF) following each record. The first entry is the Schoolmaster ID for the student in quotes, a comma, the student's picture filename in quotes, followed by a carriage return/line feed. The name of the index file should be XREF.TXT. If you were to open the file with a text editor (i.e., WordPad or Notepad) you would see the entries punctuated as follows:

"10125","pic1995.bmp"
"12679","pic1996.bmp"
"10978","pic2001.bmp"

Most of the time this file and all of the picture files can be put on one CD and delivered to the Schoolmaster system administrator. The images will look best if they are created at a 160 x 224 resolution. Larger resolutions are supported but may not look optimal. Pixel depths of 8-bit (256 colors) or 24-bit (16 million colors) are supported. Please note that 16-bit or 32-bit BMP files are not supported.