The Hidden Risk In School Photos, with Andy Edwards, GeoSnapShot

The Dead Pixel Society host Gary Pageau interviews Andy Edwards, CEO and founder of GeoSnapshot, about the company’s origins and the overlooked privacy and governance risks in school photo workflows. Edwards explains GeoSnapshot began 12 years ago to centralize fragmented equestrian event photos and has since expanded to sports and education, now operating in 161 countries with 51 million photos and videos and about 1,000 events per month. He describes how schools often store images in scattered “shadow” systems (Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, email, closed social groups), creating consent, security, retention, and reputational risks amplified by deepfakes and AI. GeoSnapshot for Education addresses the full media lifecycle with centralized storage, direct capture without saving to teachers’ devices, identity-aware multi-level consent integrated with student information systems, inappropriate-content filtering, and end-to-end auditing. 

Edwards explains how centralized media management, identity-aware permissions connected to student information systems, and end-to-end audit trails create a clear chain of custody when a parent asks, “How did that photo get there?”

The conversation also get into the pressure cooker schools face right now: AI-driven misuse, deepfake concerns, and fast-changing regulations like retention and deletion requirements. Finally, we explore what video governance can look like, including optional facial recognition, finding a student inside long recordings, and generating short highlight snippets or show reels for events like graduations and performances.

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Transcript

Welcome And What GeoSnapshot Does

Erin Manning 0:00

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Media clip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers. Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau 0:18

Hello again and welcome to The Dead Pixel Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Andy Edwards, CEO and founder of GeoSnapShot. Andy's coming to us from Australia today, and he's going to share with us the history of the company and what is the hidden risk in school photos that no one's talking about. Hi Andy, how are you today?

Andy Edwards 0:44

Hey Gary, I'm very well, thank you. And thank you so much for having me on Dead Pixels. I'm an avid listener, so it's nice to be on the other side of the fence.

From Equestrian Photos To Global Scale

Gary Pageau 0:53

Well, we'll find out how nice that is in a moment, shall we? But first, let's get started with a little bit about GeoSnapShot, where it came from, where you fit in this whole weird imaging world, especially in the volume photography space. But also you've got other places you play too. And so can you start there? Like, where did you guys come from?

Andy Edwards 1:15

So the history of the company is quite interesting. 12 years ago, I founded Geo Snapshot. It came out of a conversation and also a need. My wife competes in equestrian sports, show jumping, dressage, cross-country, that kind of thing. She was really upset because after she'd do one of these events, there was loads of photographers there, but all the photos are fragmented. You could never know where that photographer's photos were or whether somebody was posting on Facebook. So you had to go around and search for everything. And it was a really poor way of distributing photos. So I decided it would be a great idea that time. I never quite knew where it was going to go to, but I thought it'd be a great idea to try and centralize and help all these people with a website to enable them all to be able to upload to a central repository where people could go and access their achievements of that particular sport. And they could sell their photos there for the price that they wanted to. And everyone wins, right? Central repository. Photographers don't have to have their own, you know, marketing mechanisms, and everybody comes to one place. So that's how it all started, and it went very well. It was great to see the community of photographers coming together, and it was fantastic to see actually the more event organizers were catching on to using Geo Snapshot as a central repository. We went into other sports quite quickly, we went nationally quite quickly, and then internationally within probably 12 or 18 months into the US with people like Tough Mudder and Spartan and large organizations. So we grew very rapidly. We operate now in 161 countries. We have 51 million photos and videos on the platform. And we have a thousand events a month with over a million photos uh uploaded. And during that journey, we obviously listen to our customers on the way through. And I guess the focus for some of this conversation is really around the school side of the business. So we set up a new vertical called GeoSnapShot for Education. We noticed a lot of schools using GeoSnapShot for their sports and various other activities. But there's always a use case, right? The interest is always in listening to the customer about what they need and then building around that. So we listen to schools and have developed uh you know product there with GeoSnapShot for Education. And then latterly, we've really started accelerating quite rapidly into the school photography marketplace as well, where we support the kind of ad hoc or you know, sort of extra kind of events, balls, galas, commencements, that kind of thing for school photography companies. So it's a focused business which is focused on the memories of people's lives, distributing those memories to them. And but we don't do things like landscape photography or or kind of weddings or anything like that. It's a centralized repository for sports, schools, and school photographers.

Andy Edwards And The Tech Path

Gary Pageau 4:32

So, what was your background to start this? I mean, you were right out of school, you had to do something before this.

Andy Edwards 4:40

So I did computer science from an early age. So I picked up computers and really enjoyed that as a teenager. I came to university doing computer science and business.

Gary Pageau 4:51

Sure.

Andy Edwards 4:52

I then worked for IBM in their UK headquarters, and I was responsible for commercializing their kind of weird and wonderful technologies, right? One of those technologies at the time was virtual reality. And I worked with ESO and BP, with our uh big IBM sales teams, to train people in virtual reality how to escape burning oil rigs. So that was quite a fun project. Uh, I also got very involved with the distribution of video across the early days of broadband networks. So the start of YouTube, the start of Netflix, you know, the technology that goes into that. Uh, worked for a UK company that was the first in the world to distribute movies across broadband networks into people's homes. I got an opportunity to set that company up in Australia. So we had a joint venture with a company in Australia, uh, and I actually came down to Australia and set that company up. And that was in early 2000s, and yeah, really enjoyed Australia and stayed here after they asked me to move back to Hong Kong to run the business from there, but I really enjoyed Australia. So sort of English by birth and sort of growing up, but really Australian now through and through.

Gary Pageau 6:11

Yeah, I can't imagine that there's a lot of dressage in Hong Kong.

Andy Edwards 6:16

Well, I mean, they do do a lot of horsey stuff there, you know, they do a lot of horse racing and things like that. I just think you need some space for that. But they have racetracks, they have quite big races. They're quite a lot of money involved, so they don't have many of them, but the ones that they do have are quite prestigious and things like that. So, yeah, there's quite a lot of horse activity across there, that sort of world. But GS snapshots really come on leaps and bounds from there. Kids' sports and and you know, taekwondo, and any sport that you can name has probably been on. But but yeah, it's a good fun time seeing this.

Why School Photo Storage Is Risky

Gary Pageau 6:56

Tell us a little bit about kind of what makes GeoSnapShot different than just say, I'm gonna dump my pictures up in a gallery somewhere and give everyone who goes to it a password. Because there are some privacy features involved that are inherent in the platform, correct?

Andy Edwards 7:15

I guess this conversation's really around the school side of the piece.

Gary Pageau 7:20

Sure, but I want people to understand that it's not just just somebody with a photo album type software somewhere, like there's dozens of those.

Andy Edwards 7:28

The issue is starts from this, right? Is that every school takes thousands of photos and videos uh actually of kids and their activities, be them during, you know, actually at the school itself or on vacuum vacations with the school, camps and things like that. And all these photos are taken in good faith, right? Right. They're all you know activities that teachers or or the photographers there believe, you know, that people are interested in. Right. But they're really sitting in places where nobody sees them and nobody controls them. And this is the hidden risk. Even with those folders that you mentioned with passwords and things like that. Well, who has access to them, right? Who in those photos has consent from the parents to do that? So this is not really a hypothetical issue about the risk of photos. Uh it's really a real issue about how do you control the whole life cycle. You know, consent is not just a tick box, right? It's a whole life cycle of that photo, from how it's taken or by who through to how it's distributed. So, yeah, much more than just folders, passwords, and things like that.

Gary Pageau 8:46

Yeah, especially if you think about what the brouhaha we've had here in the first quarter in the US with what's been in the news with one of the biggest companies in the North America, who's literally doing nothing wrong because they're not involved in, but just the rumor mill that they may have been attached to a controversial figure is wrecking their reputation, right? I mean, that's just something everyone's got to be mindful of.

Andy Edwards 9:15

So the issue is that it's a topic at schools that people know about. Photos are stored on SharePoint and Dropbox, all those kinds of situations. But really, nobody's talking about the risk of that. And and I actually think, you know, I know some of the audience here are schools, but some are audience of school photographers and and generally the the trade around you know, mass you know, photography. And really, there's a great opportunity to be a thought leader in this area from all of these organizations and really be part of a solution. Right. When we talk about issues such as you've mentioned, we really it's really opened up a huge amount of conversation, right? In in the first quarter of this year. We need to open up similar conversation before there's major problems, you know, in schools about how are you managing these things, how are you managing consent, how are you managing risk, how are you managing taking photos, how are you distributing those photos is a big issue that that needs that I think the power is in having those conversations early before a situation happens, and then trying to resolve that because then you're aware of what's going on.

Gary Pageau 10:36

So let's talk a little bit about the current situation, the current problems. Let's say you're well, I'm not talking about like big school districts that may have great privacy policies, but the vast majority of you know, smaller schools and that sort of thing where they're just not thinking, right? So, what are the type of exposure that there are they opening themselves up to by not having a reasonable privacy platform in place?

Andy Edwards 10:59

Yeah, so privacy platforms exist, and you mentioned some of the larger, you know, sort of territories there and things like that. Privacy platforms are in place, but not necessarily for the media, okay, of those. So they they will have student information systems, they will have privacy, they will have the media consent, right? For parents. But is it being used? Is it being utilized by the software, if there is any, in the school that is managing the media? Right. Teachers take photos or or photos are taken at school, they end up in a in a folder, in a Google Drive, in a Dropbox, or sometimes they're even in Facebook.

Gary Pageau 11:39

Right, or doesn't say social media, they put on social media.

Andy Edwards 11:42

And they may be closed, right? But a closed Facebook group is not secure, right? Right? Yeah. So fragmentation of the uh of the photos is a real problem. Who's taking them? Where are they? Who has consent of those, right? And it comes back to that central repository is one of the answers. But the teachers with really the, I don't know, the right, the right sort of thought process in mind, using those photos in shadow solutions, they are saying, oh, here's some parents that want photos from the away weekend. I'll just email them or I'll put them on an Instagram group that I've set up, which is an invite only. That's not secure, right? And and when governance needs to come into play, you mentioned the privacy policies of schools and things like that. When governance needs to come into play, you don't know where those photos are, right? So governance is one of the key issues and it fits very strongly into that privacy, and it can be managed very, very easily. One of the ways to do that is having a central repository, but the other one is having a policy from when photos are taken right the way through to when photos are distributed, and all of the bits in between that the consent, inappropriate content, all those kinds of things.

Gary Pageau 13:07

Because you may have a situation where a class goes on a field trip, and the teacher takes some pictures on the field trip, and she wants to post a picture, but there may be a student or two in some of those photos who, for maybe safety reasons, may not want their picture public, right?

Andy Edwards 13:28

And consent is something that is not a tick box, as I said, it's part of this life cycle of the photo. Consent can change, right? Consent can mean multiple things, it can mean do not take photos of me at all, right? It can mean don't publish these photos anywhere, it can mean that you can use them in a yearbook, but not for posting on the school's website, for example, right? So multiple levels of consent are important, but also consent can change over the years as well. Sure. So how is that managed within the school? And you can start to see that this is the way that it's always been done is take photos, stick them in a folder, perhaps put a password on them, away we go. That is not something, as we've seen from situations earlier on this year, and our conversations with schools that is acceptable in terms of a privacy policy, it's not acceptable to parents anymore. Photos have been, you know, used in deep fake and things like that. If photos have been posted on social media, um AI is now prevalent there.

Gary Pageau 14:40

Well, are they even being used to train AI, right?

Consent As A Full Photo Lifecycle

Andy Edwards 14:43

I mean, that's a whole other issue. So schools have I think a real concern internally, it may be voiced, it may be not, about how do we manage our media, what is the privacy policies, how do we give control to the parents to set those privacy policies, and how do we make sure that any photos the teachers that the school uses for yearbooks or for newsletters or whatever else have consent, right? And uh and so yeah, the risk doesn't live in the photo, it lives in the in the life cycle and the systems around it, right? So, how does GeoSnapShot address some of those issues? So it starts, as I said, with the capturing of the photo. So, you know, when we talk to schools about how they want to manage photo, every school is unique in the way that they want to go about it. But we believe that by listening to the schools and then thinking about the solutions, the actual solution that we want to put in place, we can hit, you know, and help multiple schools with that. So it starts with the capture. A lot of teachers have been and still are capturing on their own devices, right? On their iPhones, capture the photos that's stored on the teacher's device, and then at some point they'll get uploaded somewhere. That's a huge risk, right? You you know, teachers should never be capturing on their own devices or keeping the photos on there and everything else. So we have abilities for uh photos to be able to be sent directly to GS snapshot or GS Snapshot for education, and therefore they're never stored on the device. And all these settings are set by the school. We have identity-aware consent, not by folders, right? So it really links into the student information systems, picks up permissions that have been set by the teachers in in the school's student overall student information system, and then reflects those in the photos. There are multi-level permissions, you know. As I said, can you use this for website? Can I use this for social media? Can I use this for yearbook? Can I use this? All of those things are set up. And it saves the school a huge amount of time and effort because they can just search for, show me all the people that I can use in a newsletter from the year seven, a weekend away. Done. Here they are, right? Inappropriate content is really interesting as well. So we now have filters around what might be conceived as nudity, what might be conceived as violence, what might be conceived with if there's sports, any blood on the photo, for example, things like that. So these sort of settings can be set to further protect the school from putting a photo somewhere where there's going to be a foraw about that, right? And the other one is the auditability end-to-end. So if a parent comes to you and says, Hey, how did that photo end up here? This is a problem. There's an audit of this is when it was captured, this is the settings that you put, this is where it was posted, this is who viewed that photo, this is who downloaded that photo, etc., on the life cycle of the photo.

Gary Pageau 17:59

So there's almost like a chain of custody, if you will.

Andy Edwards 18:04

Yeah, exactly. Right. And if you think really about how schools are managing media right now, it's archaic compared to the sorts of things that we've just talked about here, right? And this is where I come back into the industry. So the industry as a whole, uh, education leaders, uh, school photography companies, we can be part of this conversation, opening this conversation up within schools, because there are solutions to this. And we can be part of the school's uh thought process and a knowledge leader, if you like, for the school in the future by asking these questions, you know. As a school photography company, for example, you know, there's a lot of sharing of yearbook photos and various other things that go on, but they have a great relationship with the schools, they have a great relationship with the media companies at the schools. Why not have this conversation about how are you managing your photos day to day at the schools? And can we help with some of the regulations, the privacy policies, and maybe some software structures, software services that can help you in the future? So be part of the conversation opener, be part of the solution of having the conversation.

Governance Pressure From AI And Laws

Gary Pageau 19:26

Because you know, the reality is the people who are teaching the children and the administrators are not legal experts per se. They're not media management professionals per se, they're not digital asset manager management professionals at all, you know, because they don't know these things. That but there's increasingly from the outside a lot of either legislation or regulations that are coming into play, where you may have, you know, there's some US states where they're saying you can't hold on to these pictures for more than two years, they must be deleted or getten rid of. So who's managing that? That whole permission structure is all part of these things where you don't know what you don't know when it comes to these things, and you may be opening yourself up as a school district or as a teacher to potential liability because you don't realize that outside forces, outside entities or the legal system are imposing themselves onto your school trip to the zoo, if you will.

Andy Edwards 20:33

A hundred percent. And legislation's changing quite rapidly. Certainly, the technology is changing quite rapidly with AI and you know, all of that. But the question is really, how do you embrace that? How do you have this conversation in the education world, be it at you know, schools or or at district level or whatever? How do you have this conversation about what risks are we open ourselves up to and how can we best manage that? And as I these solutions, the solutions exist, it depends on when the conversation's happening. And as you said, the fragmentation of these photos is is everywhere, you know. In terms of that deleting after a certain period of time, yeah, maybe different in different states. But who can manage that right now at a school? Who even knows where all the photos are? And so it's a question that really should be being asked and mapped out. When we do this with schools and we map out their media flow through a school activity or through the school itself, they're quite shocked about where things are happening. The governance is probably not there in the right place, but it's not something to be fearful of. Like any of these policies or IT security or anything that goes on, it's really a matter of raising the questions, raising the awareness. And then seeing where you stand with that, because being able to then solve that problem is what it's all about rather than burying your head in the sand.

Gary Pageau 22:08

Yeah, and that's you got to get ahead of it, right, before it becomes a problem. Because, you know, that's what when you get that phone call for whatever reason that there's a problem, that's too late.

Video Search Show Reels And Controls

Andy Edwards 22:41

And I I honestly think that the education world should be, shouldn't fear this conversation, right? But it it they should be leading it. You know, we should be leading these conversations with schools. As you said, the regulation is changing all the time. They're not legal experts. You know, we are schools, school photography companies, education leaders, we're experts in these areas. Right. We shouldn't be experts in these areas, exactly. We should be leading these conversations with them to say we want to help you understand this, even if it's just a piece of paper with are you looking at these things? You know, you looked at this, but are you aware that these policies are in place in your state? For example, that's one type of conversation. The other type of conversation is how can we best work together, right? I mean, yeah, I mentioned school photography companies because I just think they're a they're a perfect fit with the schools to be leading and be thought leaders, right? Right in this area with the schools, uh, and not necessarily providing a solution, it's not about selling a solution, it's about engaging them in media, which is what school photography companies do, you know, and saying, How did how are you managing this? Because we're aware that they there could be risks at the school. Let's work through that together.

Gary Pageau 23:59

What about video? Is there any you're doing anything with because obviously TikTok and Instagram reels and all those things are part of this too? How do how does Geo snapshot handle video at all?

Andy Edwards 24:11

Yeah, we've got a lot happening with video. So video works in exactly the same way for us as photos. So on our platform, and and the listeners might not be aware, but on our platform, we've had facial recognition as an option to be able to be used by sports and schools since 2017 on our platform. So we've got a lot of a lot of experience with face recognition, and as I said, it's optional. Uh, we understand that not all districts and not all places around the world have the right regulation in place to have that. So we do make these technologies, biometrics and things like that optional for people. But video is really interesting, obviously video, and so we do have video on our platform, we enable video to be uploaded. We also do face recognition on video as well. So if there is, let's say, a large piece of video, you know, half an hour of video, a few hours of video, we can actually find the place that you appear in that video and pull that snippet of video out, right? So instead of you having to download or watch or whatever the whole piece of video, we actually sort of magically find you in that video, and we can find you multiple times in that video and actually pull that, these those little snippets together into like a show reel, if you like, of of your attendance. So things like graduation ceremonies, where there's a photo at the start, there's the the the grip and grin, uh, and there's a photo at the end, that can be pulled together into what we call the show reel. So, yeah, it's a video of the of the still photos and the spicets of video as as one video for that particular participant. It's very engaging for parents, and obviously, if they want to share it on social media, then very engaging on there as well.

Gary Pageau 26:06

And I could even think for things like either a sports highlight reel for a youth sports event or even like a theater, like a play, right? Who wants to sit through two hours of a play when I just want to see my kid? Yeah, exactly. Right.

Andy Edwards 26:20

Dance contests, you know, you know, everything. It's it's really about for us, it's really about that way of getting so yeah, all of those things you can see lots of lots of opportunities for that. So I've forgotten exactly how many photos, sorry, videos we've had uploaded in the last year, but it would be tens of thousands, right? So yeah, it's it's a it's a big thing. We haven't massively launched it yet, to be honest. We've just opened it up to a few of our big sure organizations to play with, and some of the larger schools do use video uh on the platform. So yeah, we're we're continuing to to progress those technologies. After all, we are a technology platform, yeah.

Gary Pageau 27:03

And video is certainly not going away as a platform. I mean, so people are going to be using more and more of it.

Andy Edwards 27:08

Yeah, but for us, it's really about how to bring that together. So when people mention video, it's really interesting because they see a snippet of video. Well, what we see is a timeline of an activity happening, right? A story, if you like, you know. So it might it's so if you're let's say you're at a triathlon event and it's slightly different for schools, but there's the swim, bike, and run. All of those things should be brought together into this show reel, which is your activity at that event.

Gary Pageau 27:41

Right.

Andy Edwards 27:42

And you should be able to get the individual pieces as well if you want to. And you can see whether, as you rightly say, if it's a play at school, right? There's the makeup beforehand, there's the play itself, there's the celebration afterwards. Well, all of that can be brought together rather than being individual pieces, is actually the storyline of that student at the school.

Gary Pageau 28:02

What's been the strangest request you had from a customer or a client?

Andy Edwards 28:14

We do get asked a bit, not much, to edit photos, which is not something that we do because a lot of school photography companies are uploading and things like that, and they're all, you know, they're all professional photos anyway. But from sports events, you know, take out the backgrounds, you know, things like that, take out the mic, take out the other person, that kind of thing. Yeah, I I don't think there's too much strange. I can't think of anything off the top of my head which has really standout. We don't have a sort of major kind of support queries coming in. Yeah, it's you know, a lot of our system is really self-fulfilling. Yeah, people like MSP and Advanced Life and SchoolPix in Australia use our platform uh and we share any customer support that comes in, but it's very little, really. Customers might say, Hey, can yeah, I got the bought the wrong photo or you know, that kind of thing. But yeah, not really many strange requests that I can think of in my uh in my timeline there of trying to think about it.

Gary Pageau 29:17

So because what I was thinking of is you know, when you're talking to potential clients and current clients, you're really having a conversation about what their objectives are. So I imagine there's certain things that they ask that are eye-opening because you there are applications you had not thought of.

Andy Edwards 29:35

Yeah, so in our latest work with schools, we've been working uh with a very large prestigious school in Australia who's very advanced in their, we believe very advanced in their thought process. And it's really given us a six-month roadmap for for schools and development of school technologies. That's been quite eye-opening in the sense of they really know what they want. Right. What we often find, what we like to do as a company is listen to the problems that schools have, then understand that deeply, and then come up with a solution that matches that, but possibly enhances that as well. So often when schools come to us, they've seen a feature in another platform, be it Google or you know, whatever. You know, they've seen a feature there, and they're like, oh, I'd like that feature. But actually, what they would really like is something a bit broader and a bit bigger and a bit wider than that. It's the that's the instigation of a thought process for them that they've seen elsewhere and they like it. Right. How can we build that for everybody? Uh, and how can what is the actual problem that's underlying that feature that they're asking for? I think that's the key key point there, right?

School Roadmaps And How To Connect

Gary Pageau 30:51

So if I wanted more information on GeoSnapShot, where would I go? How do I begin that conversation?

Andy Edwards 30:59

There's a number of ways to do that. One is to go to our website, gsnapshot.com. There you'll find all the information or a lot of the information about schools and sports and what we do as an organization. You can contact us at support at gesnapshot.com with anything there. And if you're a school or a school photography company, we've got a contact form as well on our website that you can fill in all the details about who you are and how you know what you would like to talk to us about. We're doing a huge amount of work in North America at the moment. As I mentioned earlier on, we operate in 161 countries. But North America's very big for us in terms of a marketplace and has been for a number of years now. So yeah, if you're interested in getting in touch, we're more than happy to open up a question or answer questions about anything to do with schools from a regulatory point of view, as well as you know, how GeoSnapShot can or could help the school or school photography company. So, yeah, that's how they can get in touch.

Gary Pageau 32:01

Awesome. Thank you, Andy. It's been great talking and seeing you again. We've met a few times, so it's always good to see you, my friend, and uh look forward to seeing you in person again real soon.

Andy Edwards 32:11

Thanks, Gary. Really appreciate the opportunity.

Erin Manning 32:16

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.theadpixels society.com.