What may be posted
The question should be answerable without anybody remembering anything
“Can we put this one up?” is asked hundreds of times a season, usually quickly, usually by somebody who is doing three other things. A permission model that depends on that person recalling a form signed in September is not a permission model.
How the question resolves
An image is held against an activity and a session. The participants for that activity and season are a list the school already maintains. Each student on that list carries a permission state, held per student, defaulting closed, and re-checked at the point of use rather than trusted from the moment it was collected.
So the answer is computed rather than recalled. A person picks an image; the system resolves what may be done with it. The person is not asked to hold a hundred families’ decisions in their head, which is fortunate, because nobody can.
The wall underneath all of it sits in the database rather than in the application: a read from outside a school’s own tenancy returns zero student rows because the database refuses it, and that is re-checked on every build. A new feature inherits the wall whether or not its author considered it.
Inward and outward are different questions
A photograph in a yearbook is seen by the school community. The same photograph on a public channel is seen by everybody, permanently, and is indexable. Families routinely feel differently about those two things, and a permission model that offers one answer forces a school to pick which way to be wrong.
Holding the question as “may this student appear, and how far” keeps both answers available. It is also, in practice, what a permission form was always trying to express and what the single tick-box on it could never quite say.
A minor’s photograph is never made public by default, never indexed by a search engine, and never sold. Sharing outward happens only where a permission on file allows it, and even then it is a deliberate act rather than an open door.
What this deliberately does not decide
It does not write your publication policy. Whether a school posts fixture photographs at all, on which channels, and with what captioning convention, is the school’s decision. The system records and applies a policy; it does not supply one.
It does not resolve the wide frame by itself. Where an image genuinely is a crowd rather than a participant list, no mechanism produces a per-student answer, and a page claiming otherwise would be selling a comfort rather than a control.
It does not reach what has already left. A change of permission applies at the next use. Paper that is printed is printed, and something posted outside the school’s own systems is outside them.
It does not draw a legal conclusion. Every sentence on this site describes a mechanism. Whether that mechanism satisfies an obligation is a question for a school and its counsel.
The same question, asked of each collection
The mechanism is one mechanism, but what it has to resolve against differs by collection, and so does how well it does. Setting that out per collection is more useful than one claim that covers all four equally, because it does not.
Team photographs
A posed team image is a participant list with faces on it
Attached to the season roster at capture, not to a filename.
Resolves cleanly. A posed team photograph is a participant list, the list is the season’s roster, and every student in the frame is on it. This is the easy case and it is worth naming as the easy case rather than presenting it as evidence the whole problem is solved.
Action photography
Hundreds of frames, most of them of somebody
Resolved against the participants on the roster for that fixture.
Resolves against the fixture’s participants. Frames from a fixture resolve against the participants for that fixture, which covers the players. Where a frame catches a spectator or a student from the opposing school, the participant list does not answer for them, and the school’s own policy has to.
Performance and the arts
Cast lists that change between the dress and the night
Each performance is its own roster instance under the production.
Resolves per performance. Because each performance is its own roster instance, an image resolves against the cast that was actually on that night rather than the cast list printed in the programme. That distinction is invisible until an understudy is in the photograph.
Events and the ordinary day
Where a school’s photo library usually fragments
Held as a collection with per-student state, even where there is no formal roster.
The hardest case, and the honest answer is partial. An event collection often has no formal participant list at all. Per-student state still applies to anyone identified in it, but a wide frame of an assembly is not a per-student question, and no mechanism turns it into one. The school’s publication policy decides, and the system records and applies that decision.
How much of this the mechanism actually covers
Computed at render time from the same collection list the panels above are generated from. A claim of full coverage would be easier to write and would be wrong.
Questions about publishing
Who ends up making the decision?
The permission on file makes it, applied by the system when the image is used. A person chooses which image to use; they do not have to also remember which students in it may appear, which is the part that fails.
What about a photograph of a crowd?
A wide frame is the hardest case in any permission model and this page will not claim it is solved by mechanism. Where an image is held against a participant list, the list is what resolves. Where it is genuinely a crowd, the school's own publication policy decides, and the system's job is to record and apply that decision rather than to invent one.
Is 'posting' the same permission as appearing in the yearbook?
Not necessarily, and treating them as one is what forces a school to choose between over-restricting the book and over-publishing outward. Appearing in a school publication and appearing on a public channel are different questions, and a permission model that can hold them separately is one that lets a family answer them separately.
Can a decision be changed later?
Yes, and it takes effect at the next use rather than at the next scheduled job. What it cannot do is reach something already printed or already published outside the school's control, and this site says that plainly rather than implying a recall that does not exist.
Does this make any compliance claim?
No. This describes a mechanism: where the wall is, what defaults closed, what is re-checked and when. Whether that satisfies a particular obligation in a particular jurisdiction is a question for a school and its counsel, and marketing copy is the wrong place for the answer.
Where the participant lists come from is on activity rosters. How the same question is answered inside a publication rather than on a channel is at homeroom.pictures, and the same story written for a parent is at homeroom.family.