Australian schools have been told to review how they share images online
You can do that without showing less of your school.
What the eSafety Commissioner actually asked for. It is one sentence.
On 28 July 2026 the eSafety Commissioner published an advisory for Australian schools on sharing imagery. Its instruction is short: “Schools should review how they collect, approve, post and store images.”
The reason is in the same advisory. Between January and March 2026 eSafety received more than 100 reports about anonymous accounts targeting schools and school staff. “Almost all involved imagery harvested from school social media accounts or websites.”
Read the eSafety advisory in full. We use the regulator’s own words rather than our own, because on a question like this the source matters.
The advisory is careful and it is worth reading properly. It asks schools to weigh purpose, consent, identification, audience, governance and storage before publishing. Every one of those is good practice.
But look at what it offers under alternatives: crop the image, take it from further away, leave the names out. And then, plainly, that posting fewer images of students and staff, or none at all, reduces the risk.
That is honest advice, and for most schools it is a real cost. A school that stops showing faces stops showing what it is like to be there. Enrolments, community, the reason a family chose you in the first place: all of it lives in photographs of children who look happy.
Once content is public, schools have little control over who copies it, where it is distributed or how it may be modified.
There is a third option, and the advisory does not have to name it for a school to take it. Publish the photograph. Remove the identity.
Before and after images use licensed stock photography. No child from an Australian school appears on this page.
The advisory is new. The obligation underneath it is not.
Every Australian jurisdiction already requires a school to manage risk in its online environment. The wording is close to identical because all of it descends from the same Royal Commission.
| Where | What it is called | The words |
|---|---|---|
| Australia-wide | National Principle 8Endorsed by governments Australia-wide | “Physical and online environments promote safety and wellbeing while minimising the opportunity for children and young people to be harmed.” |
| Victoria | Child Safe Standard 9Applied to schools through Ministerial Order 1359 | Minimum requirement 9.2: the online environment is used in accordance with the organisation’s code of conduct and child safety and wellbeing policy. |
| New South Wales | Child Safe Standard 8Mandatory for schools since 1 February 2022 | “Physical and online environments minimise the opportunity for abuse to occur.” |
| Queensland | Child Safe Standard 8Child Safe Organisations Act 2024, commenced 1 October 2025 | “Physical and online environments promote safety and wellbeing and minimise the opportunity for children to be harmed.” |
Queensland’s regulator goes one step further than the others and says it in the language of a school website. Among the actions it lists: “consider your online presence and how children are represented and how their images are used”.
And in Victoria, government schools already hold a named policy on exactly this. The Department of Education’s Photographing, Filming and Recording Students policy requires schools to obtain “parent or carer permission before student photographs, films or other recordings are made publicly available”.
Read that sentence closely, because it is the whole problem in one line.
Consent decides whether you may publish a child’s image. It has nothing to say about what happens to that image afterwards.
A signed consent form is a permission, correctly obtained and properly recorded. It is not a control. It does not travel with the file, it cannot be enforced against a stranger, and it cannot be withdrawn from a copy somebody else already holds.
You do not have to show less of your school. You can remove the identity instead.
Aidos was built for one job: protecting children’s identities in photographs that have to be published.
Before an image goes out, Aidos finds the real child’s face and replaces it with a realistic synthetic face. The replacement is permanent and there is no recoverable original.
The uniform stays. The classroom stays. The playground, the sports carnival, the assembly, the expression on a face mid-laugh: all of it stays.
The school, the activity and the moment remain. The child’s real facial identity doesn’t.
So a prospective family still sees children who are plainly happy to be there, and the photograph does not hand a stranger a face, a name, a uniform and a location in one file.
What Aidos does not do. Set against the advisory’s own checklist.
Aidos protects published identity. It answers one point of the eSafety checklist and leaves the rest to you.
| The advisory asks about | Aidos |
|---|---|
| Identification: does the post reveal a face, a name, a uniform, a location? | Removes the face. The rest is still yours to manage. |
| Purpose: does the image need to show identifiable detail? | Makes the answer easier, because you no longer have to choose between the photograph and the child. |
| Consent, governance, storage, old material, privacy settings, audience | Nothing. These are your policy, and Aidos does not touch them. |
Specifically, Aidos does not review your consent forms, does not secure your image archive, does not clean up material you published years ago, does not manage your social media settings, and does not stop a parent photographing a school concert.
It also does not remove images already in circulation. Nothing can. That is the reason the advisory is worth acting on now rather than after an incident.
If a supplier tells an Australian school it can solve the eSafety advisory, it has not read the advisory.
How Aidos handles the images you upload.
- The real child’s face is replaced with a realistic synthetic face, permanently, with no recoverable original.
- Images uploaded by schools are never used to train models.
- Image metadata is removed.
- Images are encrypted during upload and download.
- Processing takes place on secure infrastructure hosted in Ireland (Amazon Web Services).
- Your team chooses which protected version is published. Aidos produces five, you pick one.
- Aidos is a closed system, so images can only be uploaded and viewed from inside an authenticated account.
On that fifth point, plainly.
Aidos processes images in Ireland, not in Australia. Australian Privacy Principle 8 covers cross-border disclosure of personal information, and any Australian school assessing Aidos should put it through the same overseas-provider check it applies to every other cloud service it uses. We would rather you found that out here than three meetings in.
“The online sexual abuse of children is reaching pandemic levels, and the emergence of AI is fuelling the demand. Aidos is using AI for good, to prevent the innocent images of children hosted on school websites being turned into child sex abuse material to extort the image host and destroy a child’s life.
Aidos can prevent this form of sexual extortion in its tracks, which is why I am supporting them and their vision for a safer online world.”
We are looking for founding Australian schools. We have none yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Aidos is a United Kingdom company and it is new to Australia. We have no Australian customers, and this is not the page to imply we do. It is the page where we ask you to trust us with photographs of your students.
What we are looking for is a small number of Australian schools willing to be first: to run their own images through, tell us where it does not fit an Australian workflow, and hold us to it.
If your school is reviewing its image sharing after the July advisory anyway, this is a good week to test something.
See what Aidos does to a school photograph
Before. The original photograph carries the child’s real facial identity.
After Aidos. The school, the activity and the moment remain. The real face has been replaced with a realistic synthetic face.
Before and after images use licensed stock photography. No child from an Australian school appears on this page.
Try Aidos with your own images
Run a photograph your school has already published, and see what it looks like with the identity removed.
You will need an account before you can upload anything. Aidos is a closed system, so images can only be uploaded and viewed from inside an authenticated account, and the free trial is how you get one.
Pricing starts at A$565 a year for 100 images at a single school. If you need more or fewer, we will work out pricing that fits.