With a simple scan of their yearbook photos, students will soon be able to upload up to 10 photos of their choice that will stay with them for years after graduation.
The Anchor has made this all possible for students with their newest addition of a program called Yearbook+. With the aid of Jostens, the company behind this program, students will have access to this new feature upon release and purchase of their yearbooks.
Yearbook+ turns a students’ school picture into an image that can be scanned with any smart device. From there, it’ll prompt students to a website acting sort of as a “mini Instagram”.
Students can then choose up to 10 photos of their choice to upload onto the website that will remain accessible for them for years.

“It’s fun for people to do, it adds more content and more memories and it gets more people involved,” The Anchor Editor-in-Chief Hope Reynolds said.
The deadline in which students can upload their photos is June 1st, and as of right now the feature is only allowing for photo uploads and no videos.
Students are suggested to add photos of moments they want to remember after they have left high school. This could include photos of homecoming and prom, pep rallys, sports games and even graduation photos.
To ensure the new feature won’t contain inappropriate content being uploaded, The Anchor adviser, Sam Hanley, explains that it’ll also include three layers of filtering that photos will have to go through before being uploaded.
“There’s a computer filter that looks for certain things,” Hanley said. “Then there’s an offsite company that scans them with the human eye and then I look at them one time just to make sure.”
The idea for Yearbook+ was originally proposed by their publishing company as a marketing tool, and The Anchor hopes that the implementation of this new feature will promote more yearbook sales.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Hanley said. “I think that any way that you could get more students involved with contributing content is another opportunity to create a buyer, a user for the product and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Along with gaining more customers, another goal they hope to achieve with Yearbook+ is to gain more student interaction with the yearbook. They hope that students will be intrigued by this feature and be inclined to purchase a copy of the yearbook to try out this new feature for themselves.
“We just hope to bring more people into the book and get more coverage and also have a fun way for people to interact,” Reynolds said.