Turn scattered photo archives into work you can account for.
You have photos across drives, CMS folders, SharePoint, old campaigns and public pages. Some have consent records. Some do not. This workflow shows how Ansikt helps you find the people, attach the records you already hold, and see what still needs a decision.
What you put on the table before step one.
You bring two things: read-only access to the systems that may hold photos, and the consent records you already have. Paper binders, PDF batches, a digital register, or all three.
Ansikt gives you the overview, the review queue and the audit trail. Originals stay in your systems. Security details live on the security page.
Ten steps from "we have photos everywhere" to "we know what needs work."
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Connect every source that might hold photos.
The pain is not one folder. It is the old campaign drive, the CMS media library, SharePoint, an S3 bucket, and the public site someone forgot to retire.
You authorise read-only access to each source. Ansikt does not move, edit or delete your files. Anything you leave out stays outside the archive overview.
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Crawl the archive.
Ansikt walks the sources you authorised and records where each image was found. You get one working view instead of a manual sweep across every system.
Each crawl event is logged with the source and time, so your DPO can see where the archive picture came from.
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Scan your own public website.
Optional: include material that is already published on your own sites. Old press releases, forgotten galleries, campaign microsites and image blocks may still be live.
Ansikt scans the domains and websites you own and adds those appearances to the same archive view. No third-party scraping. Not the open web.
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Match known people across the archive.
The same person may appear in a staff portrait, an event gallery, a newsletter image and a website hero. By hand, that becomes guesswork.
For people with a consent record, Ansikt links matching appearances across the archive and flags uncertain matches for review. You get the overview without pretending every match is certain.
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Confirm the uncertain matches.
You do not have to review every face from a blank screen. Ansikt puts uncertain matches side by side and asks for confirmation where the system is not confident.
You confirm or reject the match. Ansikt records the decision and uses confirmed matches to improve accuracy over time.
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Adopt the consent records you already hold.
This is usually the messy part: paper forms, PDF scans, exports from older tools, and records that use names instead of image references.
You create an archive Campaign and define the Purposes the old records should cover. For each consent record, Ansikt records the Purpose you attach it to. The system reads only the name, email and date from the document; it does not read the consent text.
When a record names a person, Ansikt proposes the matching person record in the overview. You confirm or reject the link. Anything you cannot match stays unresolved until someone makes the decision.
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Review use by Purpose.
The hard question is not "do we have this photo?" It is "can we use this image for this Purpose?"
Your editor reviews the image, the people in it, the Purpose, and the consent records together. Ansikt shows where the record supports the use, where it is missing, and where the subject can be asked for consent before reuse.
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URL Proxy in front of public-facing images.
For public images you choose to serve through the Ansikt URL Proxy, the publish decision can be enforced at request time. Faces without permission are blurred in the served image.
Scope matters: only images served through the proxy are enforced. For images served directly from your origin, Ansikt can surface the issue, but an editor still has to remove or replace the file manually. See URL Proxy.
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Find affected images without a manual sweep.
When a data subject asks where or how their images are used, your DPO should not have to ask three teams to search five systems by hand.
They search by reference photo or identity. Ansikt returns the appearances it knows about across connected sources, with the source path and audit trail needed to decide the response.
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Audit close. The engagement is on the record.
The archive review leaves a record: sources checked, uncertain matches reviewed, consent records attached, decisions made and gaps left unresolved.
From here you are in operating mode — see Workflow C: Operate & maintain for withdrawals, expiries, takedowns and new requests.
Photos in your systems. Overview and audit in ours.
Original images stay in your DAM, your Drive, your SharePoint, your CMS — wherever they already live. Ansikt reads via the connector. Originals never leave your infrastructure.
Consent records stay in your existing system of record — the binders on your shelf, the PDF folders on your share, the digital register your team already keeps. Ansikt stores the link between your record and the person in the overview.
The overview and audit log sit with Ansikt. See Security for hosting, access control and retention details.
The places that need a human.
You touch three things by hand in an archive review: confirming uncertain matches, binding old consent records to the right people, and deciding whether an image can be used for a Purpose. Ansikt narrows the work. You still own the decision.
Volume varies by archive quality, image type and how clean your existing consent records are. The point is not to pretend the work disappears. It is to make the review queue small enough to handle.