The best way to tell the story of your school is through pictures. Social media makes it so easy to share photos of our students, but not everyone on your team is a photographer, so you get photos like this:

Now, this isn’t terrible, but it isn’t ideal. How do you fix it?  Ask your teachers to stop and crop each image before they send it to you? No! I mean, you are just happy you are getting photos!
But, there is no excuse for you. If you want engagement—if you want to gain more reach with your posts—then you have to take the time to crop. That is your number one, easy-to-do trick to take OK pictures and make them great.

Cropping in Seconds

Editing every single picture that comes into you can be tough if you do it on your computer. You have to save the photo, go into your photo editing software, work your magic, resave the photo, and then go into social media to post it.

There is an easier way.

Post the image from your phone! The Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram apps on your smartphone or tablet have an edit button on each picture as you upload it. To do this, you must first save the image to your own camera roll.

Watch the photo quality

The more you try and crop closer, the less quality you will have. There is no getting around that. But if you start with a high-resolution photo (1-2 MB), you’ll be fine.

You should always ask your staff members to send in pictures at as high of a resolution as possible. On most phones, you get a prompt asking what size of image size you want to send. Always pick the highest.

Fancier Editing

The sky is simply the limit of photo editing. You can reduce red-eye, use cool filters to enhance color, and add many other effects right from your phone.

Your computer has even cooler editing techniques. I recommend checking them out, just so you know what comes standard with your computer. (When you open an image, your computer will default to a program. Check that one out).

See what I did with the original photo? I used this focus tool that made one spot in the image stay clear and the rest became a bit blurry.

All of this editing is fun to do, but it isn’t necessary. It can lead you down a path of hours instead of minutes to upload your photos onto your social media pages. So keep it simple. Focus on cropping, and I promise you’ll see more engagement!

There you have it! I’d love to hear from you once you try this trick on your school pages. You can always email me at andrea@socialschool4edu.com.