How Fort Worth Country Day Turned One Platform into Their Entire Visual Story
Reggie Johnson shoots 500 to 1,000 photos per event. The website uses two. The magazine uses five. Parents want to see all of them. That gap — between what a school captures and what families actually get to experience — is where most schools lose their visual story.
Fort Worth Country Day found a way to close it. And in the process, they turned their media platform into something much bigger than a photo library.
The Problem Most Schools Recognize
Before Vidigami, Fort Worth Country Day’s photos lived everywhere and nowhere. Hard drives. Google Drive. SmugMug. Multiple people needed access, but nobody knew where anything was — or had permissions when they found it.
Consent management was especially painful.
Reggie on the old consent workflow: “I’ve had that piece of paper by my desk, looking at the kids and seeing if it’s one of our no-photo kids in this photo. Have it up on my wall and I’m like, trying to see — with a magnifying glass.”
And when teachers or parents were asked to share their own photos? The consistent response: “I don’t know how to do that” or “I’m not really very tech savvy.”
- Photos scattered across hard drives, Google Drive, SmugMug
- Consent managed with printed paper and a magnifying glass
- Non-technical parents and teachers couldn’t contribute
- No central place for anyone to find anything
- Summer archiving projects every year
- One platform feeds every channel
- Consent automated — opt-out students flagged system-wide
- Anyone uploads from their phone with one link
- Everyone knows exactly where to go
- Archive builds itself automatically
One Platform, Every Channel
What makes Fort Worth Country Day’s setup unusual isn’t that they use Vidigami to store photos. It’s that Vidigami became the single source feeding every way their community sees media.
It not only feeds your content platforms, it is a platform. It not only feeds your channels, it is a channel.
Reggie Johnson, Fort Worth Country Day
Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms all sourced from one curated library
Slideshows embedded directly on graduation, fine arts, and community pages
Two large monitors display recent event slideshows — students see themselves daily
Slideshow links in parent emails keep families connected to school life every week
The designer sources all publication photos from Vidigami instead of email chains
Year-by-year organization lets teams pull a student’s entire photo history instantly
Reggie creates a “best of coverage” collection from each event — pulling the top photos from his thousand-image sets so the news team, magazine designer, and newsletter creator don’t have to dig. Everyone goes to one place.
The Upload Link That Changed Everything
The biggest shift didn’t come from Reggie’s professional photos. It came from everyone else’s.
Vidigami’s Media Upload Request link generates a simple shareable URL. Reggie sends it to parents and teachers before or right after an event: “Hey, if you’ve got any photos, click this link and you’ll easily be able to share them straight from your phone.”
No app download. No login. No instructions needed.
“Teachers will come back to me and say, ‘I did it. I put my photos up there and it was so easy. It was way easier than I thought.’ And that’s been wonderful.”
The result: more contributors, more perspectives, more authentic coverage. Teachers capture photos of every kid in their class — filling gaps a single photographer would miss. Every parent can see their child on Vidigami.
Twelve Years on One Page
Fort Worth Country Day’s archive doesn’t require a summer project. Everything uploaded during the year becomes the archive automatically. And with facial recognition tagging each student across every photo and every year, something powerful emerges.
Imagine being the parent of a senior who has gone to the school since kindergarten and being able to go to one page — that student’s Vidigami page — to easily find all the photos their child was ever visible in from every single year. It’s like a living yearbook solely dedicated to the students you are most interested in — your kids.
Reggie Johnson, Fort Worth Country Day
First day of school. Sports days. Performances. Graduation. Ten years of memories, searchable in seconds and private to the community that created them.
When Students See Themselves
Two large monitors in the Fort Worth Country Day cafeteria display Vidigami slideshows of recent events. The same slideshows are linked on the community hub page so parents see what their kids see at lunch.
The reaction was immediate.
“The people who work at the cafeteria tell me, oh, the kids were looking and they were saying ‘Look, it’s you, look, it’s you.’ And so it’s kind of neat to be able to do that.”
One high schooler even walked into Reggie’s office to ask about a photo on the cafeteria screen — her friends were teasing her about her expression. Reggie marked that single photo as protected, and it was removed from the slideshow immediately. No process. No paperwork. Just a quick, respectful response.
That kind of interaction — a student feeling comfortable enough to speak up, and the tool making it easy to respond — is what digital citizenship looks like when it works.
What Stays When People Leave
Reggie arrived at Fort Worth Country Day during COVID, when activities were limited and historical photos mattered more than ever. Because his predecessor had organized media in Vidigami, he could find photos from years before he started — tagged, searchable, and ready to use.
He found photos of the school mascot “Talon” tagged by name from years ago and used them to create an animated sticker. The system outlasted the person who built it.
That’s the difference between a photo collection and an institutional archive. One depends on the person who maintains it. The other just works.
Watch the Full Webinar
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Full Webinar: Fort Worth Country Day
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