About
Two sites, identical rules, different jobs — and we would rather say that than pretend
College Gallery is built and operated by Stanley Studios. It shares every rule with our university site, because our own system does not distinguish the two institution types. What it does not share is the reader.
Why two sites for one set of rules
Because a product page is not a rulebook. The rules being identical does not make the jobs identical, and writing one page for both would have meant writing it for neither.
An advancement office at a research university is managing decades of archive, class-year reunions and a relationship with donors who were photographed in 1988. A student-life office at a community college is managing this term, with three student workers, for a cohort that will be substantially different by next autumn. Those are not two intensities of the same job.
We are telling you this on the About page rather than burying it, because you will find both sites and you should know which one is for you. If you have a multi-decade archive and a giving programme, the other one is written for you and will be more use.
Who builds it
Stanley Studios, which ran the studio side of school and campus photography before it wrote software for it. The order matters: the awkward parts — the person who was not on the list, the agreement that changed after the shoot, the request that arrives two years later — were the first problems rather than the ones deferred.
It also made us conservative in a way that reads as unambitious. Correctness rules live in the storage layer rather than in screens, so a wall applies to a feature whether or not its author thought about it. And where a clever mechanism is optional, the dull one wins: a photograph reaches the right person by a roster lookup, because you already know who was at your own event.
The plain inventory
Software marketing describes planned work in the present tense and lets the reader sort it out. This is the whole picture.
| Area | State | What that means exactly |
|---|---|---|
| Subject-held decisions about publication | Working | Defaults to no; consulted at the moment of use |
| Withdrawal after a student leaves | Working | Applies going forward, at the next time anybody looks |
| Imagery attached to a person on your roster | Working | A lookup on a name and an id, not a face scan |
| Revocable access for a partner or a publication | Working | Re-verified on every use rather than handed over as files |
| Verifying that a request came from the subject | Yours, not ours | We hold the imagery; identity verification is your process |
| Anything purchasable | Early access | Live payment is not turned on; no checkout exists anywhere |
| Proving a face template was destroyed | Not finished | The cleanup raises a standing alarm rather than pretending |
No adoption figures, no institution names, no testimonials. A product at this stage that displays those has usually manufactured them.
Questions about us rather than the product
What does it cost?
The platform is free to the institution. There is no per-student fee and no seat licence, so there is no purchase to route through a budget holder. The intended income is elsewhere in the platform and live payment is not turned on, which means today the business model is described rather than running.
Do you work with four-year institutions?
Yes, and if you are one, university.gallery is the site written for the office you are probably in. The rules are the same either way; the material there is about archives and class years rather than about this term.
Can our student newspaper use it independently?
They can hold and organise imagery with the permissions attached, and their staff are adults with real roles rather than supervised minors. What we do not do is adjudicate editorial decisions -- what a publication runs is between the publication, its adviser and its own standards.
What happens to imagery if we leave?
It comes with you. Because the images live in the same system as the records rather than with a separate vendor, leaving is an export and a wipe rather than one negotiation per vendor.
Is our student media a separate customer from us?
In practice they usually behave like one: a different deadline, a different set of people and a strong preference for not being administered. What we hold is the imagery and the decisions attached to it, which both offices need; who administers which part is a question about your institution rather than about the software.
What if our institution is both two-year and four-year?
Many are, and the rules do not change either way. Pick the site whose office you sit in: if your job is this term and this cohort, this one. If your job is class years and a giving relationship, the other one. Nothing about the underlying system depends on which you read.
Who reads it when we get in touch?
A person at Stanley Studios. There is no form on this site because nothing here collects anything from you. What a first conversation looks like is on talk to us.