Overview

People Search (http://web.newriver.edu/directory/) is the College's online public directory and contains information for all New River email account holders (students, employees, alumni, and others). Currently, photos only appear in People Search for employees who submit a photo using the New River ID Card system (see ID Card Procedures). We do not currently share photos of students or non-employee account holders.

Once submitted for the ID Card, the employee photo is available to IT staff to be copied and customized for use in People Search. This includes (1) resizing it to 125 x 125 pixals, (2) optimizing it for the web, (3) saving it as a JPG file while naming it with username.jpg to comply with naming conventions, then (4) uploading it to the People Search server in the designated directory.

This document provides detailed steps for preparing the photos for People Search, so the procedure is transparent enough to be completed by any IT staff member (and as a series of steps to follow for Dr. Ayersman, who typically completes this task).

To complete these steps, the IT staff member must have administrator access to the INRANET (this is the People Search server) and administrative access to the myPhoto ID server.

Procedure for Preparing People Search Photos

The following steps detail the process of preparing photos for use in People Search:

1. Photos are submitted by employees when they request a New River ID Card (https://myphoto.newriver.edu/). With some effort, these photos can be duplicated and included in People Search.
2. The IT staff member needs to login to the myPhoto server as an Administrator, choose Review Photo, and search for the photos needed for People Search.
3. Right-click the photo to view it in a new tab, then right-click it again to download a copy to your local computer.
4. Open the saved photo with Photoshop.
5. Create a new blank image sized at 125 x 125 pixels (or open a previously used image of this size) and copy/paste the new image into this correctly sized image. Position it in the center so that the head and shoulders are correctly aligned.
6. Use the Save for Web option of Photoshop to optimize the photo for use on the web, click Save, then name the file with the person's email username as the filename (e.g., username.jpg). I save them to my local computer but then upload them to web.newriver.edu/photos, then I login to web.newriver.edu and download the photo to the proper folder (/directory/).
7. Regardless of how you do it, to appear in People Search the photo must ultimately be saved on web.newriver.edu/directory/ to this folder: C:\\Apache24\htdocs\directory\photos\username.jpg
8. Open People Search and query by username for the person to verify that the photo appears correctly. If it doesn't appear, ensure that you named the file correctly (username.jpg) and that you placed it in the proper folder on the web.newriver.edu/directory/ server.
9. Because I routinely upload employee photos to the WEB server as an intermediate step, we have a New River archive of all employees since 2007. You can browse this archive with this URL: https://web.newriver.edu/photos
   

About These Procedures

Clearly, the procedure identified above is not the most efficient solution but it does work. If employees are encouraged to request a New River ID Card during initial orientation, this process would work best.