Sports Day fills a card with two thousand frames. Photos is the desktop app that empties it, files it by the day it was taken, learns the children’s faces across the years, and sends only what you choose to the school’s own library in Commun.
Point the app at the card and at the library folder. It reads the capture date out of every file, shows you a thumbnail of each one, and copies only what you tick.
Every file is previewed, including raw frames and the newer phone formats. Videos show their first frame.
The capture date comes from the file’s own metadata, not from when it was copied, so a card emptied a week late still files correctly.
Files already in the library are marked. Tick a whole day, or a single frame, or all of it.
Photos and videos land in their own folders by date. The card is never modified and never emptied by the app.
Nothing is written until you press Copy, and an interrupted copy never leaves half a file behind. A file with the same name but different content is kept alongside rather than overwritten, because on a school field the same camera body will produce DSC_0041 twice in a season.
The library indexes itself into a small database kept inside the library folder, so tags, ratings and people travel with the photos. Copy the folder to another machine and nothing is left behind.
Hover or focus a photo to see who the library recognised in it.
Mirrors: Media Library (desktop) → Library → tag tree, faces and Publish. That app is dark by design; the tiles are drawn, never photographs.
Tags are dotted paths — events.sports-day.2026 — drawn as a tree with counts. Filtering by a parent includes everything under it, so one click gives you every Sports Day you have ever run.
Faces are found by a recognition pass you start yourself. Matching is deliberately year-aware: a new face is compared against that person’s faces from within two years either side, which is what it takes to follow a child from Year 4 to Year 11 as their face changes. Confident matches are assigned; borderline ones wait in a review queue for a person to confirm or reject, and every confirmation extends what the library knows about that child.
Editing is non-destructive. The first save moves the untouched original aside and writes the rendered version in its place, so tags, ratings and people survive the edit, a re-edit always renders from the original, and Revert returns the file byte for byte.
The library is paired to your school once, with a code the school generates. From then on, a photo reaches Commun because somebody selected it and pressed Publish.
Selected photos go up on the next sync with their tags, ratings, events and named faces. Unpublish takes them down again on the sync after that.
Delete a photo from the library and the school’s copy goes with it. There is one library, and it is the one on your machine.
School administration and teachers open the published library from their own portal, filtered by date, event, tag, rating, person or a search — and download the full-size file when they need it.
Nobody in the portal can retag or re-edit a photo. Corrections are made once, in the app, and the next sync carries them across.
A second library trying to pair to a school already paired is refused, so two people cannot quietly overwrite one another.
Each published photo carries its face boxes, so a name can be shown against the right child rather than the whole frame.
The app runs on the school’s own machine when it is opened, and serves its screens to that machine alone.
Most schools have a single member of staff who shoots everything and a shared drive nobody can search. Photos replaces the drive with something that answers a question.
Find every usable frame of a house captain in four years of Sports Days, in one filter, on the day the prospectus is due.
Pull the photographs of one event for a display board or a leavers’ book without asking anyone to search a drive for them.
Because publishing is a deliberate act on a chosen selection, a photograph of a child whose family withheld consent is simply never sent.
The desktop app is live and in use. The Media Library add-on inside Commun — the pairing, the sync and the Photos browser for school administration and teachers — shipped on 31 July 2026 and is switched on per school. Ask us for the app and we will pair it with your school.
Bring us one shared drive and one Sports Day, and we will show you what the library makes of them.
More of the platform: the school’s own app · AccessPoint HRMS · Callboard