In yearbooks and school photography, an "index" (sometimes referred to as a PSPA or a PSPA disc) refers to the list of student names and corresponding photo files names that our yearbook software uses to flow your student portraits together onto your yearbook pages.

PSPA stands for Professional School Photographer Association. This index usually comes in the form of an Excel document or spreadsheet packaged together on the website containing your student photos. Your index will usually be organized by first name, last name, grade and teacher (if applicable). The index is critical to successfully uploading your student photos to the EDOnline People Page designer.

To locate your index, begin by opening the files sent to you by your photographer. As mentioned above, this may be in the form of a CD (hence the name PSPA disc) or perhaps via a link to a downloadable file folder. Your index should be included among the files, and will usually be titled “INDEX”, “MASTER INDEX,” or sometimes just “MASTER.” Usually you will want to use the MASTER if multiple indexes are present, as this includes retakes or edits. Once you have located your index, check the file type to make sure it is compatible with the yearbook software. Your index file type should be either .tsv, .txt, or .csv. If your index is not one of these three file types, contact your photographer and request that they send you an updated index. If your index is in a google sheet/excel sheet, download as one of the accepted file types. Once you have confirmed that you have the correct index file in your possession, you can move forward with saving both the index file and the student portraits onto your computer. We suggest saving these items on your desktop to make them easier to find.

When you have saved your index and student portraits onto your computer, you are ready to upload your index.

After downloading and saving your index file, open it in excel to make sure the data looks correct, all the columns have different information, and the nothing is overlapping. All of your information must be in separate columns to successfully upload your index file.

The photo file listed is to match the student/teacher up with their correct photos when they are uploaded. Photos will not flow with the people if there is not a photo file listed.

After you checked over the data, you are now ready to upload your index into the designer. You will go to your ladder, then under manage you will select manage people data.

You will now click the blue Click Here To Upload Photos and Student Index button

Now under Select Photo Category, select where you want your people page data to go. Typically, a category labeled People Page Photos is already created for you when the account is set up, but if not, we recommend making one.

*(NOTE:  Folders are not recognized files and cannot be dragged and dropped to place photos. You must open the folder for your index file or people page photos and select them, then you can drag and drop or browse and select all to upload them. The upload progress bar will appear for each photo and index uploaded with the index uploading last.)

Once you have your index uploaded, a new window will appear and you will need to identify each column. It is important that there is a column for the photo file number, last name, first name, and either grade, class, or teacher. Grade, class, or teacher, will determine how you can group students to flow them. If you want to organize your students by teacher, make sure you identify the teacher category. If you want to flow only by grade, make sure you identify the grade column. [You may leave the additional column headers blank or select the dash (-) option if that column will not be in use.]

Now your people page photos and your index file will merge and you can look through to confirm that all the students who have had their photos taken by the photographer are linked with their student information.

*If you do not have a master index file, and instead have a separate file for each class/grade, you will need to repeat the process above for each index. 

You can click the View Uploaded Student Indices button to view any and all of the indices that have been added already and to confirm the data headers.