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 file names that yearbook softwares use 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 CD 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”

Now under select people photo category, select where you want your people page data to go. I usually place mine under people page photos to keep them all together.

After you upload your index, it will have a pop up asking you to confirm your data headers. You can select from the drop downs what each category is. Make sure to select what each category is so the information when you flow your students will be there!

You need to identify which column is 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 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.

Now your people page photos and your index file will merge and you can look through to confirm all students who have photos have one and each student has their name listed.

You are now ready to flow your students and you can learn more about how to flow and set up people pages here