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Importing Portraits & Managing Data

The portrait manager associates information about the people in your school to their portraits – their names, the groups they belong to, and their priority ranking. This information is used to create customizable portrait grids across multiple pages of your yearbook in a few easy clicks.

Importing Portraits

Before you use automation tools to create portrait pages, import your school’s portrait package into Memento Yearbook.

Note: Only Editors/Editor-in-Chief can import and manage portraits as the book must be checked out during this process.

What is a PSPA?

Most photo studios use a portrait package known as the PSPA (Professional School Photographers Association) format.

The package consists of one or more folders containing portrait images and a data file saved as Index.txt. 

The PSPA format assigns one row per person/photo. The columns contain data in a particular order, as listed below. The following categories are required to import and build pages in your yearbook. Additional categories may be included.

  • A. Volume Name: School name or a default field, like “Yearbook”
  • B. Image Folder: The name(s) of the folder(s) containing your images
  • C. Image File Name (including file extension): File names given to the portrait photos, usually a .jpg
  • D. Grade: Assigned to students and possibly teachers
  • E. Last Name: Family name of the person in the portrait
  • F. First Name: Given name of the person in the portrait
  • G. Teacher Name: Can be first and last or last name only

Tip: Check out the section on Portrait Upload FAQs if you encounter any problems with your PSPA.

Importing a PSPA & Photos

The following video will walk you through how to import a PSPA file to upload portraits into your yearbook.

Step by Step

  1. Click Manage Portraits on the left-side menu, then Check Out the book
  2. Click Import People
  3. Click Upload PSPA Index
  4. Locate the index.txt file on your computer (usually located next to the folders holding the portrait images). Select the file, and click Open
  1. Verify that column headers match the data underneath (See the example shown to the left – Grade information is not incorrectly assigned to the Last Name column)
    • Click on a column header to reassign the category, if needed
    • Each category may only be used once
    • If a column contains unnecessary information (eg. random codes), set the column to be ignored
  2. Click Import People in the top menu
  1. Click on Import Photos
  2. Click on the Upload icon
  3. Drag the photos to the Upload icon
    • Portrait photos will upload, attaching themselves to the people listed in the database

Once the import is complete, see the section below on Managing Portraits for information on how to make corrections in the database (eg. fix typos, reassign people to different groups), import another index (eg. retakes, senior photos), assign roles to staff, or create portrait pages in your yearbook.

Portrait Upload FAQs

Find resolutions to common questions:

If your portrait photographer has only provided portrait photos without a database, or you wish to include photos for people who missed photo day (homemade portraits or placeholder images), you can import these into your portrait manager.

Note: If you are adding retake or extra photos to an existing import, be sure to match the formatting of the portraits already in the database.

After the upload has completed, the portrait manager will display a warning about portraits that are missing critical information. Complete the information describing the portraits in the data table (eg. names, grades, teacher/homeroom, etc).

Tip: More information on editing portrait data is available in the section below on Managing Portraits.

Memento Yearbook will only import a .txt file. If you’ve received a .csv file format, simply rename it to a .txt and it will import without issue. Other formats may require you to import them into Excel or another spreadsheet application, then resave them to a .txt format.

If your database simply looks wrong when you import it into Memento – full of random alphanumeric codes, missing file names, etc. – your photographer may have given you the wrong portrait package format.

To verify the format:

  1. Open the index file in a spreadsheet software, like Excel, or a notepad application
  2. Look for extra columns, data that appears as random alphanumeric codes, or missing critical information such as filenames, grades or names
  3. Contact your photo studio to ask for a PSPA-format database should these problems be discovered

Some portrait databases may have been formatted in all-cap characters (eg. CAREY STJOHN). Unfortunately, the portrait manager is not able to auto-convert names in all-caps to mixed case.

  • Information in the database is case-sensitive
  • Upper and lower case versions of the same name are seen as unique records
    • Students with the same last name may fall out of alphabetical order on their pages if different capitalization rules are used (eg. Peter MacIntyre would appear before Anna Macintyre, when the opposite may be expected.)
    • This is particularly important when using the Teacher column (eg. The database will treat a teacher group named McKay as separate from a group named Mckay, making it impossible to create a single portrait page mixing the students in both groups.)

Tip: When re-assigning a person to a new group, be careful to select pre-existing groups rather than to retype the entire group name.

If most of the data appears correct at import, but there is one or more columns of extra data, set these column headers to “Ignore column.” This will exclude this information from importing into your database.

If your database contains more that 100 characters in any column, the import will fail. This excludes any field under the Notes column, which may contain 255 characters. (Notes may not be used in labels, so usually this information is not particularly useful.)

Occasionally a photographer will provide a portrait database package that is not PSPA format, but it will contain all the information needed to create portrait pages. The other information is simply not required.

Note: If the data table contains more than thirteen columns, an error will occur at import.

To fix this issue:

  1. Open the data file in a spreadsheet software
  2. Delete the extra columns, keeping only the essential info (file name, first & last name, grade, homeroom, teacher, salutation, job title)
  3. Resave the datafile as a TXT format, using Save As… under a new file name to avoid overwriting the original file (eg. INDEXrevised.txt)
  4. Import this new index file into Memento.

If there are problems with importing the portrait images to accompany your database, check the Index file in a spreadsheet software or notepad application.

  • Compare the actual file names of the portraits listed in the index file versus the actual portrait names
  • The file names in the data table must exactly match the actual names of the portrait files
  • Check the index file for missing zeros starting the file name, typos or extra spaces, and ensure that the file name includes the JPG extension
    • You may be able to manually correct the file names, but if you are not able to, ask your photographer for a new PSPA format table, explaining in detail what is wrong with the package you received.

If there are just a few missing photos, check to make sure the images were actually included in the portrait package. Ask your photographer for these missing images – they may be added to the portrait manager record directly without need to import all photos again.

Tip: If you feel that you still need help with these resolutions, please reach out to Studio Source Yearbooks Support for further assistance. 

Portrait Manager Overview

After importing the portrait package, Editors/Editors-in-Chief may correct and make additions to the portrait data using the Portrait Manager at any time during the yearbook building process. Existing portrait pages will be automatically updated whenever corrections and additions are made.

The portrait manager features tools to search, sort and filter your portrait database, as well as to alert you to potential problems. To make changes to the portrait database, click on Manage Portraits on the left-side menu of the book manager, then Check Out the book.

  • A. Portrait Manager Menu – Used to add new people or edit exsting people
  • B. Errors and Warnings – Notifies you of people that need corrections
  • C. Smart Filters – Allows you to filter on specific groups that need corrections
  • D. Keyword Search – Allows you to filter on individual people or by group
  • E. Navigation Tools – Allows you to jump from page to page in the database
  • F. Scroll Bars – Allows you to see additional rows and columns

Managing Portrait Data

Selecting, Searching, & Sorting

Using the Smart Filter
Click the Smart Filter drop-down box to search in your database for people with missing or incorrect data or to select a group for bulk editing.

Sorting by Columns
To reorder the portraits in any particular order within a column, click on the up or down arrows on the column header.

Searching by Keyword
Type into the Keyword Search Field an individual’s name, grade, homeroom number, or a teacher’s last name to see all portraits assigned to people with that information. To clear the filtered search, simply delete the information in the search field.

Adding / Editing Portrait Information

To add or edit information unique to a single person:

  1. Click into the respective field to see the available options
  2. Select the correct information or add new information
  3. Click Update to apply the change

To add or edit information for multiple portraits:

  1. Checkmark the individual portraits
  2. Click Edit People on the portrait manager menu
  3. Type the new or corrected information into the respective field in the form
  4. Click Update to apply the change

Adding / Replacing a Portrait

To add / replace a portrait:

  1. Click the Portrait Preview in the data table
  2. Click Upload Photo under the existing portrait or portrait placeholder image
  3. Select the new photo on your computer and upload it
  4. Click Save New Photo to complete this change

Note: If the person already appears on a portrait page, their image will be updated.

Assigning Roles to People

Assigning a Role to a Single Person:

  1. Click into the person’s Role column
  2. Select their role from the list
  3. Click Save

The person’s information will now include their selected role as well as a department assignment and a priority number.

Assigning a Role to Multiple People:

  1. Checkmark all the portraits that will receive the role
  2. Click on the Assign Role button on the portrait manager menu
  3. Choose the role common to all selected portraits
  4. Click Save

The selected portraits will be assigned a role, a department and a priority.

After assigning roles to your staff members, you may wish to add job titles and salutations (Mr., Ms, Dr.) – this information can be displayed on the portrait labels.

To ensure that Homeroom Teachers and Assistant Teachers appear on their own classroom pages, make sure that their Grade, Teacher Name and/or Homeroom information matches the information associated to their students.

Tip: The teachers may also appear on the staff page – use Assign Role to place them into a Department, which can be used to build a staff page.

Assigning a Portrait to Multiple Groups

Portraits may be assigned to more than one group, allowing the portrait to appear on more than one portrait page.

To assign a portrait to multiple groups:

  1. In the Portrait Manager, click into the column where the person needs to be double-assigned
  2. Type in both group names separated by a comma (Do not include any spaces between the group names and the comma)
  3. Click Update

For example, if an assistant teacher is assigned to two teacher’s classrooms, enter in both teachers’ names with a comma (no space) between them. Be sure to match the exact spelling and case of the existing groups.

Adding People Without Portraits

People who do not have a portrait image may still be added to your portrait pages as a placeholder image with a label.

To add people without a portrait:

  1. Click the New Person button
  2. Complete the form to add information about the person
    • Note: Be sure to add the same group assignments as the person’s classmates, so they will appear on their group’s page.
  3. Click Create Person to complete the record
  4. Click Cancel when prompted to upload their portrait

Tip: The placeholder image can be replaced with another image that is 640 x 800 pixels.

Excluding and Deleting People

To Exclude one or more people on your portrait pages:

  1. Checkmark the portrait you want to exclude
  2. Click Edit people on the portrait manager menu
  3. Change the Excluded option to Yes

This is useful if you have two images for the same person but do not want to delete the alternate image.

Note: The portrait will not disappear from the portrait manager, but will no longer appear on any portrait pages.

To Delete one or more people permanently:

  1. Checkmark the people you want to delete
  2. Click Delete People on the portrait manager menu
  3. Confirm your choice

Note: This process cannot be undone. The record will no longer exist in the portrait manager nor the portrait pages.

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