Photographs on Unit Websites

[thedqs]

My daughter moved from one tech saavy YSA ward to a non-techie YSA ward. Her picture did not go with her. When she returned to the techie ward for the summer, they immediately took her picture once more.

That is what usually happens. At BYU the first week of the semester is fill in the questionarie and get you picture on the website.

[jworkin-p40]

Church Headquarters does not keep a database of members pictures. If a picture is posted in a unit and the member moves to another ward, the picture does not go along with the membership record.

I took a picture of a member and loaded it on our ward unit website. They moved out of the ward. When I learned that they had moved into another ward in our stake I searched for their name. The picture that I had taken now showed up in the new ward along with their new address.

It was a few years ago though, so perhaps we could say headquarters used to keep a database but for some reason removed that functionality.

Our stake was just split and some of our boundaries were changed. We sent records to at least one other ward in our stake and I know that the pictures we had associated with those records (as I can see those wards' photos). I'm not sure about the records that went into new wards in our old stake (as I can't see those). But its clear that at least within in a stake the LUWS photos do move as well.

[bdalton]

As a new web administrator, I recently requested ward members to send me a family picture to put on the web site. I neglected to suggest limiting the number of people. The first picture I received was from an older couple with no children at home. The picture had 16 people in it! After cropping and resizing the picture, it was hard to make out the faces, but still possible. I posted it and the wife was actually quite pleased with the way the picture turned out on the web site. In the future I think I'll suggest just Mom and Dad only for large families, or perhaps the parents and one or two kids, but 16 is pushing it a bit.
In most cases I think the small picture size is adequate for the purpose of putting faces with names.

[amc79]

Has anyone thought of taking pictures of individual members and not just family photos? Family pictures are helpful for associating people, but I think individual photos would be more useful for primary teachers and youth leaders seeking to connect the names and faces of the children they serve. Perhaps a member's photo could one day be attached to his or her membership record and could travel with him / her as he leaves home to attend school, get married, or go on a mission. Church leaders could have individual members' photos on hand as they're pondering over assignments and callings. I can also see it being easier to get individual photos (i.e., have everyone line up in Elders Quorum and take their photos one at a time at the end of the meeting) as compared with trying to get an entire family together between classes or after the meeting block on a busy Sunday.

Any thoughts?

[russellhltn]

Any thoughts?

In general, a good idea, although there's a bit of a issue of staying current. Youth and Young Adults can get kinda sensitive about that last year's photo.

At this point MLS doesn't support photos and LUWS only supports a family photo. (Works fine in a singles ward.)

[jsweeny-p40]

My wife and I take pictures of the ward members every year for our annual photo directory (we're in a college town so the ward changes a lot). I put the data in an Excel spreadsheet and use Publisher's "Catalog wizard" to construct the directory from a template we created (willing to share if anyone is interested). Anyway, on to the topic now: I then shrink the photos and upload them all to the church website. That is how we do things here in our ward.

[opee]

My wife and I take pictures of the ward members every year for our annual photo directory (we're in a college town so the ward changes a lot). I put the data in an Excel spreadsheet and use Publisher's "Catalog wizard" to construct the directory from a template we created (willing to share if anyone is interested).

I would be interested in seeing your template. I posted a thread last month requesting others to share if they had something.

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=678

[jsweeny-p40]

Okay, I'm sharing two files here: One Excel spreadsheet and one Publisher template.


Here is the Excel template:
https://www.slashtmp.iu.edu/public/down ... 3552sb86SY

I started with the csv that you can get from your ward website via lds.org. The reason I used this instead of the exported data from MLS is beause it is one family per line instead of one individual per line.

So, start with the csv data and modify it a little to make it formatted like this example. The main changes you'll make are adding ampersands to wives, commas to children, and filenames for family pictures. The pictures will look best if the aspect ratio is 3x4 (I used the MS Office Picture Manager to do that).

Next, here is the Publisher template:
https://www.slashtmp.iu.edu/public/down ... 9741Ibx6KA

This uses Microsoft Publisher's Catalog Merge Wizard to push the Excel data and the pictures into a 'catalog'.

I cram a lot of stuff in there. My goal was to make it more compact. The year before I did it, the folks put six families per page -- I do fourteen. So there are some funny situations:

* I only allow folks to have two phone numbers OR kids. not both
* if they have _lots_ of kids, I only allow one email address.
I tried to make examples for these in my example spreadsheet.

The final product looks somewhat like this (I blurred it to protect my fellow ward members):
https://www.slashtmp.iu.edu/public/down ... 5608nBTA94

I add a few more pages with stuff like:
* ward leadership: names and phone numbers
* contact info for stake, family history center, institute
* temple info, hours, etc.
* addresses of missionaries from the ward


When you print it out, Publisher is smart enough to arrange the pages correctly to print 'a' families on the same page as 'z' since this forms a folded booklet style directory.

I am happy to answer any questions. I hope it is useful.


Jonny Sweeny
jsweeny@iu.edu

[fraserredmond]

Outside of North America we don't get access to the LUWS, though many wards (particularly YSA wards) still do photo directories. I'm fairly lazy by nature, so I came up with a low-effort alternative.

Once every year or two (about the end of summer) we take a ward photo - everybody squeezed into one place, 6-7 rows deep, kids on the ground at the front, youth standing on chairs at the back, adults sitting/standing in between. Put my camera on timer and sprint for the edge of the group (or have a visitor take it.) Crop the photo to panoramic if the camera doesn't do that itself.

Then I open the photo in a image-editor with layers, and create a blank layer, and draw round each head, and number them. I hide the photo layer, and export the black-on-white outlines layer as a Key. Put it in Word, and then match off the numbers in the outlines to the members name.

That way you get a nice historical snapshot of who was in the ward at the time, as well as a way for people to match a name to face or vice-versa.

Our ward only has about 150 people each week, so larger wards might not be able to do this.

[mbsteed]

You can also use the MLS Companion Database to create a directory of photos:

1. export data from MLS
2. import data into MLS Companion Database
3. Import images (e.g. jpegs)
5. print out photo directory

http://web.mac.com/marlo.steed/MemDbase/