Workflow for School Portraits?

darryl

Last year my son's elementary school used Picateers to host and handle ordering of school portraits. One of their big advantages was the ability to upload a spreadsheet of each child's name, classroom, a unique password, and a list of images.

Once the spreadsheet was uploaded, the galleries would automatically be created. When the images were sent they would be placed in the appropriate galleries. Nice system.

Alas, Picateers is currently out of business, hopefully to return in November.

In the meantime, I've come up with the following kludge:

• Shoot photos - around 5 poses (?) so probably at least 10-15 photos per kid. ~500 kids in school.
• Tag in Lightroom with "Room #" and "Firstname Lastname"
• Create Categories for each Grade (K-8), Subcategories for each Room
• Hack together script to bulk create galleries for each Firstname Lastname within the appropriate Grade and Room. It should also randomly generate a password (dictionary word + random number) and output a list of the names, resulting URLs and passwords.
• Dump listing of all galleries, including category and subcategory (and their corresponding SmugMug IDs)
• Hack together script to iterate through photos, read EXIF tags for "Firstname Lastname" and "Room #", look it up against the child/room listings, and use one of the command-line uploaders to upload each photo to the appropriate gallery.
• Generate e-mails/letters to each parent with the URL and password for their child's photos.

Your thoughts? Are there any other services that could serve our needs without requiring me to hack these scripts together?