How Seven Hills School Built a Quarter-Million Photo Archive — and a Stronger Community

Seven Hills School has about 420 students and a communications team of one. Over the past ten years, they’ve built a living photo archive of more than a quarter million images — not by hiring more staff, but by making it easy for their entire community to contribute.

What started as a search for a better way to manage photos on external hard drives became something much bigger: a platform that feeds their newsletters, social media, annual magazine, graduation presentations, and fundraising campaigns — all from one place.

Hard Drives, Tape Labels, and a Magnifying Glass

Ten years ago, Seven Hills School’s photos lived on external hard drives with tape labels on top — one per department. When someone needed a photo, they’d call around the school trying to find which drive had it. Flash drives appeared on desks without notes. Nobody knew what the photos were for, who they belonged to, or where they should go.

The school needed a central system — one place that marketing, communications, development, coaches, and parents could all access with the right permissions. And with an IT department of just two people, it had to be something that didn’t create extra work.

Two things made the decision: Vidigami was built exclusively for schools, and it required almost no IT overhead. Ten years later, the annual rollover still takes one person about twenty minutes.

An Office of One

Corinne Hayhurst runs communications at Seven Hills by herself. She covers eleven grade levels, manages the school’s social media, produces a weekly newsletter, creates an annual printed calendar, contributes to the fall magazine, and supports yearbook and admissions content. She can’t physically be at every event.

Because teachers and parents upload photos from events across campus, Corinne always has fresh content waiting — even from a volleyball game she never attended. She spends her time curating and storytelling, not chasing down photos.

When the school honored a faculty member with 49 years of service in the yearbook, Corinne searched his name in Vidigami and photos from across the years appeared instantly. No digging through old drives. No asking colleagues who might have something.

Twenty Minutes a Year

Kim Hughes manages all of Seven Hills’ data systems. She inherited the Vidigami rollover when the original administrator left — and found it required almost nothing.

Seven Hills syncs Vidigami with their Blackbaud student information system. When a new family enrolls, one click brings them in. When a student graduates, their record stays in the archive. Grade updates for the new school year take less than ten minutes.

The structure is built around longitudinal “Class of” containers — so a student who enters as a third grader accumulates photos through eighth grade, all in one searchable place. By graduation, their page is a complete visual record of their time at Seven Hills.

The Whole Community Contributes

The biggest shift at Seven Hills didn’t come from staff photos. It came from everyone else’s.

Teachers use phones and iPads to document learning throughout the day — especially in early childhood, where photographing student work is part of the curriculum. Parents upload trip photos from the field instead of sending them through group text chains. Even the Head of School self-serves, pulling slideshows for parent dinners without asking anyone to gather content.

Barb’s son Jay is about to graduate. Over his years at Seven Hills, the archive built itself — photo by photo, event by event, year by year. The traditional 8th grade memory board that used to require a hunt through old yearbooks now takes minutes.

One unexpected use case emerged this year: a parent volunteer started photographing items from the Lost & Found and posting them to a parent association album. It wasn’t planned. It worked because the platform was flexible enough to support it.

What Stays When People Leave

Renee Ramig chose and implemented Vidigami at Seven Hills. Then she left the school. Years later, every photo she organized was still there — tagged, searchable, and actively used by people who never met her.

When new staff arrive, they don’t start from scratch. When families graduate, their photos stay in the archive. When a student’s Vidigami page follows them through the years, it becomes something more than a photo collection — it becomes an institutional memory that outlasts any individual.