Sisters develop ClassPhoto class composite service

Sisters and business partners Amy Gray and Melanie Monroe of Patriot Photo Collective near San Diego, Calif., saw a problem: Creating class composites for their school photo clients was time-consuming and difficult. The sisters’ school photography business serves about 4,000 students and they have embraced modern volume-photography tools such as GotPhoto and its tagging workflow. But one stubborn piece of the school photography process remained painfully manual: Class composites.

These traditional products — grids of student portraits with names underneath, often accompanied by teachers, principals and administrators — remain popular with schools. Producing them, however, can be tedious and error-prone.

“Every student has to have their right name,” Gray said. “If their name is Alexander, but they go by Alex, you have to go by that. And it’s like doing the yearbook, except you’re not the yearbook person.”

Monroe added another challenge: Schools often expect the composites at a very low price, even though they can require hours of production work.

The sisters tried existing software, Canva templates and other solutions, but nothing fit their workflow. Dragging and dropping individual student photos was out of the question.

“This needs to be fast,” Gray said.

So they built their own solution.

Using AI-assisted coding tools, particularly Claude Code, Gray and Monroe began developing what became ClassPhoto, a browser-based composite generator designed specifically around the realities of school photography. The process was iterative rather than automatic: Gray said the software went through roughly 25 versions as the sisters passed files back and forth, testing features and adding capabilities.

“We’ve just been batting it back and forth, and improving it, improving it, improving it,” Gray said.

The result is designed to take exported student and staff files from platforms such as GotPhoto, PhotoDay and other systems, as long as the file structure and naming conventions are compatible. ClassPhoto can automatically organize students by class, match teachers with their classes and populate names and grade information.

Photographers can customize page sizes, fonts, background colors and text placement, while header slots can accommodate administrators, teachers or school logos. Student names can also be edited inside the workflow without requiring photographers to rename the original image files and start over.

That flexibility came directly from experience.

“The previous program I was using was so difficult to use that I dreaded this every year,” Monroe said. “It was hours, and now you can do a whole school in five minutes.”

Beta testers also pushed the sisters beyond their own requirements. One request was for a whole-school composite, something their own clients had never requested. ClassPhoto now supports composites of up to roughly 250 students on a single sheet.

Once a project is complete, the program generates a PDF that can be sent to the school for proofing, along with high-resolution JPEG files ready for professional lab output.

Privacy was another design consideration. According to Gray, ClassPhoto does not maintain a database of student photographs. Processing happens in the browser on the photographer’s computer.

“We don’t have any of it,” she said. “It’s all browser based.”

ClassPhoto may also be the beginning of a broader set of workflow tools. Gray had previously experimented with automating principals’ books, while Monroe has developed a tool for producing the student service stickers some schools require. ID cards could be another logical extension.

But class composites came first because the pain point was so obvious.

“We know that this is the kind of hangup that will make a school photographer not want to be a school photographer anymore,” Gray said.

ClassPhoto is being offered as an annual subscription rather than a monthly service, reflecting the seasonal nature of school photography. The introductory price is $89 per year at ClassPhoto.net.

For Gray and Monroe, the appeal is straightforward: They built the software they wished someone else had already made.

“If what we have now had existed already, we would not have done this,” Monroe said. “We would have just paid the hundred bucks a year.”