It is highly recommended that schools select a photographer who is familiar with and uses the PSPA format for your portraits. Doing so should provide you access to a formatted portrait CD (also called a PSPA disc) that will allow you to easily flow portraits into your yearbook.

Should your school photographer not provide you with a formatted portrait CD, the guidelines below can be used to create one for use with the Creator Studio software. For information on how to edit an existing PSPA CD, please see our PSPA Guidelines page.

Creating your portrait images

• Recommended image size: 640x800
• Images must be saved using the RGB color profile
• All images must be the same aspect ratio
• Images must be saved in the .JPEG file format.

Naming your images

• Image file names must contain only alpha numeric characters
• We recommend using 9 characters or less in the image file names

Creating the CD index file

The index file is what stores information about the school portraits, and tells the yearbook application how to import them. The index file must be saved as a tab-delimited text document (.csv). It is highly recommended to create your index file using a spreadsheet editor such as Microsoft Excel.

In the index file, information about the portraits is separated by columns. Each student and faculty member has their own row. A typical index file uses 8 columns of information, which must be in this specific order:

• Volume (usually the name of the CD)
• Folder Name (this is the name of the folder on the CD that contains the portrait images)
• Image File Name
• Grade
• Last Name
• First Name
• Teacher Name
• Home Room

When creating your index file, make sure all of the included information matches the portraits exactly. For specific examples of how to format the index file and structure your CD, please see our PSPA Guidelines page.