About
We ran picture days before we wrote software for them
Elementary Gallery is built and operated by Stanley Studios. The company’s starting point was the studio side of school photography: booking sittings, dispatching crews across several buildings in a week, and routing days against rosters full of children whose details were not ours to be casual with. That is an unusual place to start and it is why the product looks like this.
Why the order matters
Most software for picture day is written by people who have read about picture day. Starting from the operation meant the awkward parts arrived first: the absence list, the retake that has to supersede cleanly, the family who agreed in August and changed their mind in March, the student who transferred between two of the district’s own buildings in February.
Those are not the features you build first if you are trying to demonstrate a product. They are the features you build first if you are the one standing in a gymnasium at eight in the morning with a list that does not match the room.
It also made us conservative in two specific ways, and both look unimpressive from outside. Correctness rules live in the storage layer rather than in screens, so a wall is inherited by every new feature whether or not its author thought about it. And where a clever mechanism is optional, the dull one wins: matching is a roster lookup because the school already knows who was in the room.
The plain inventory, without the marketing tense
Software marketing has a habit of describing planned work in the present tense and letting the reader sort it out. This is the whole picture in one table, and every other page here is written to agree with it.
| Area | State | What that means exactly |
|---|---|---|
| Picture day and retakes on your roster | Working | Sessions run against the live roster; the missed list is derived |
| The class composite | Working | Composed from the gated library, so a withdrawal is applied not edited |
| Family delivery | Working | Resolved per family when they ask; no shared link exists |
| The district separation | Working | Held in storage, re-checked every build, not a screen rule |
| Families buying prints | Early access | Live payment is not turned on; no checkout exists anywhere |
| Sorting photographs by face | Off unless a parent opts in | Never bundled into a publication permission |
| Proving a face template was destroyed | Not finished | The cleanup raises a standing alarm rather than pretending |
There are no adoption figures on this site, no district names and no testimonials. A product at this stage that displays those has usually manufactured them.
Four things we will not do
We will not put an elementary student on the public internet. Not with a signed release, not for the district newsletter, not as a favour to a communications office with a deadline.
We will not sell your photographs or hand them to anybody as material to train something on. They sit in the district’s own area of the system and they leave with you.
We will not tell you that you are compliant. We describe what the system blocks and when it re-checks it. The legal conclusion is yours and your counsel’s.
We will not claim the part we have not proved. The face-template destruction chain is not demonstrated end to end and it says so, on the release-form page, in ordinary type.
The questions that are about us rather than the product
Is this a separate product from the rest of the platform?
No. It is one part of a platform a district runs on, given its own front door because an elementary front office is a specific reader with a specific year. The platform itself is at homeroom.software, and the picture-day operation in more depth is at homeroom.pics.
Why is there a separate site for preschool and for middle school?
Because the reader and, in the middle-school case, the rule both change. A preschool director has no district above them and a different instrument entirely. A middle school is the band where the age floor stops applying to the whole roster and starts splitting it, which is a genuinely different conversation. They are at preschool.gallery and middleschool.gallery.
What does it cost a school?
The platform is free to the school. There is no per-student fee and no seat licence for holding your own photographs. The intended income is a family store, which is early access with live payment not turned on — so the honest answer today is that the business model is described rather than running.
What happens to our photographs if we leave?
They come with you. Because the images live in the same system as the records rather than with a separate vendor, leaving is an export and a wipe rather than one negotiation per vendor. That is the other side of a single home: easier to hold, and easier to hand back.
Who reads it when we get in touch?
A person at Stanley Studios. There is no form on this site because nothing here collects anything from you. What a first conversation looks like is set out on talk to us.