How Pace Academy Built a 100,000-Photo Archive — and Stopped Saying “Can You Send Me That Photo?”

At Pace Academy, photos lived everywhere and nowhere. Server drives. Google Drive folders linked in weekly newsletters. A third-party website that parents couldn’t log into. Personal devices that walked out of the building every afternoon. The communications team fielded a steady stream of “Can you send me that photo?” emails from parents who had seen something on social media but had no way to download it themselves. Today, 100,000 photos later, those emails have stopped — and the comms team is discovering stories about their own campus they never would have known.

Pace is a K–12 school of about 1,150 students in Atlanta, Georgia. Kaitlyn Jones, Director of Communications, is in her thirteenth year at Pace — and now a Pace parent herself, with twins in pre-first. Leila Wallace, Associate Director of Communications, has spent nearly eleven years managing the school’s website and digital strategy. Together, they rolled out a photo platform during the height of COVID, intentionally slow — and watched it become one of the most-used tools on campus.

Finding a Home for 100,000 Photos

Pace hired an in-house photographer and videographer between 2017 and 2019, and the volume of visual content quickly outgrew the school’s server space. Photos spilled across Google Drive, network shares, and personal devices. The head of school was capturing incredible athletic and arts photos — but hosting them on a third-party site that parents could barely access.

Google Drive, which the team tried first, was clunky for parents. Weekly albums linked in newsletters required too many clicks and too much navigation. Teachers found the upload process slow and burdensome. Meanwhile, parents who spotted a great photo on the school’s social media had no way to get a copy without emailing the comms office directly.

When Leila evaluated alternatives, several platforms wanted to charge parents for downloading candid photos. That conflicted with Pace’s philosophy. These were community photos, taken at community events, for the community. Charging families to access them was a non-starter.

A COVID-Era Slow Rollout That Worked

Pace signed with Vidigami during the height of COVID. Most schools in that position would have either rushed the launch or shelved it entirely. Leila chose a third option: she slowed down on purpose.

With the community masked up and fewer photos being taken, she used the window to learn the platform inside and out. She built the page structure. She figured out the workflows that would make posting easy for teachers who had never used it. By the time the school returned to normal operations, the foundation was already set.

That patience paid off. When teachers finally got their hands on the platform, the experience was polished. Pages were organized. The upload flow was simple. There was no learning-curve chaos — just a tool that worked the way it was supposed to from day one.

Teachers Over the Moon

Kaitlyn’s biggest concern was not the platform itself. It was what adopting it would mean for teachers. Pace’s philosophy is clear: a teacher’s primary job is teaching. Anything the comms team introduces has to make their lives easier, not harder.

So when Leila showed faculty the app — how it worked on any phone, how beautiful the parent-facing interface looked, how easily photos could be downloaded — the reaction was immediate. Teachers didn’t need convincing. They were thrilled.

One second-grade teacher created 81 albums before mid-year. Nobody asked her to. The platform removed the friction that had made Google Drive feel like a chore, and what emerged was teachers documenting their classrooms because they genuinely wanted to share what was happening.

Every Photo Tells a Story

Some schools heavily curate their photo platforms — only polished, professional-grade images make the cut. Pace takes the opposite approach.

Vidigami at Pace is community-facing, not public-facing. It is not a marketing channel. It is a space where a blurry iPhone snapshot of a child’s first science experiment sits alongside a professional shot from the varsity basketball game — and both matter equally, because both tell a parent something about their child’s day.

That philosophy — every photo tells a story — is what makes the archive feel alive rather than curated. Parents are not browsing a portfolio. They are seeing their community as it actually is, one snapshot at a time.

The Comms Team’s Secret Weapon

Kaitlyn logs into Vidigami multiple times a day. Sometimes she just keeps it open. What she found is that the platform has become her best source of intelligence about what is actually happening on campus.

A teacher snaps an iPhone photo of a classroom project that turns out to be incredible — and it is immediately on social media because Kaitlyn spotted it in the feed. Print publications pull from the archive. Slideshow presentations at school events draw from months of teacher-uploaded content. The comms team stopped having to chase photos and started discovering stories they never would have known about otherwise.

The Parent Conversation Starter

Kaitlyn is not just Pace’s Director of Communications. She is also a Pace parent with twins in pre-first. That dual perspective gave her a firsthand understanding of what the platform means to families.

Ask any parent of a young child what happened at school today, and you will get the same answer: “Nothing.” Vidigami changed that dynamic at Pace. Parents pull up photos from the day and use them to start real conversations. “Who is this? Tell me what you’re doing in this picture.” Suddenly the child has context, and the stories start flowing.

Over time, those daily check-ins build into something bigger. The archive becomes a visual record of a child’s entire K–12 journey. Senior slideshows pull from years of photos. Graduation gifts include moments from kindergarten. The platform is not just documenting today — it is building something families will look back on for decades.

Smiling at the Sydney Opera House

Pace runs an ICGL (International and Community Global Learning) program that sends students on 115 trips to 55 countries. For the communications team, that means students are traveling around the world — and parents are at home, wondering if their child is okay.

Vidigami’s upload links let trip chaperones share photos in real time. A parent checks their phone and sees their child smiling at the Sydney Opera House. The worry dissolves. No email required, no text chain, no waiting for a newsletter recap three days later.

For a school that sends students to five continents, the ability to close the distance between a parent in Atlanta and a child halfway around the world — in real time, with a single photo — is not a feature. It is a lifeline.

Yearbook Students Mining the Archive

At most schools, yearbook production involves a painful back-and-forth: students email teachers for photos, teachers dig through their camera rolls, someone has to identify every face in every photo before it goes to print. At Pace, that process collapsed into a single step.

Middle and upper school yearbook students access Vidigami directly. Teachers tag students at the beginning of the year using Facial Recognition, which means identification is already handled. Yearbook staff search by name, by event, by team — and pull exactly what they need without a single email.

The archive also solved a quieter problem: making sure every student appears in the yearbook. When every photo is tagged and searchable, no one falls through the cracks. The platform does not just make yearbook production faster — it makes it more complete.