Your prospectus needs the photographs. Your pupils do not need to be identifiable in them.
Aidos replaces every child’s face with a realistic synthetic one before the image goes out. The school still shows. The child does not.
What Aidos does. Not blurred, not pixelated, not a black box over a head.
Aidos is the UK’s first and only AI safeguarding platform built solely to protect children’s identities in published photographs.
You upload the photograph you were going to publish. Aidos finds every real child’s face in it and replaces each one with a realistic synthetic face. Not blurred, not pixelated, not a black box over a head. A face that looks like a real child, belonging to no real child anywhere.
Before and after images use licensed stock photography. No pupil from any school appears on this page.
The uniform stays. The prize-giving, the science fair, the first XI on a wet Saturday, the face mid-laugh at the end of term: all of it stays. A family deciding whether to move across the world still sees children who are plainly happy to be there.
What leaves the photograph is the one thing a stranger could use.
How it works, start to finish. Four steps, and none of them changes how your schools work.
- 1
Upload. Your team uploads the photographs they were about to put on the website, the news page, the prospectus or the social account. Aidos is a closed system, so images can only be uploaded and viewed from inside an authenticated account.
- 2
Choose. Aidos produces five protected versions of each image. Your team looks at them and picks the one that works. Nothing is published automatically and nothing is decided for you.
- 3
Publish. The version you chose is the one that goes out. The replacement is permanent and there is no recoverable original, so there is nothing left for anyone to reverse.
- 4
Nothing to manage afterwards. Image metadata is removed on the way through, so the file no longer carries the location and device information that was written into it when the photograph was taken.
Two things to be clear about, because they matter more than a longer feature list.
Aidos replaces the face. The names, year groups and house names in your captions are still yours to manage, and they are half of what makes a child identifiable.
And Aidos protects what you publish from now on. It cannot retrieve a photograph already published somewhere else, and neither can anything else.
Why this is worth doing now. Nothing was stolen. Nothing was hacked.
On 3 July 2026 the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation issued joint guidance after a case at a secondary school. Criminals took photographs of pupils from the school’s own website and social media accounts, used AI to generate more than a hundred sexual images of those children, and attempted to blackmail the school.
Nothing was stolen. Nothing was hacked. The images were where the school had put them, for the reason every school puts them there.
The Internet Watch Foundation also reports that tools now exist which can produce a realistic likeness of a specific child from as few as twenty existing images, in as little as fifteen minutes.
Read that figure carefully, because the obvious conclusion drawn from it is the wrong one. It is one moment’s reported figure and not a safe limit. It cannot be applied backwards to photographs already published, and the capability is moving quickly enough that the number may be lower by the time you read this.
So the answer is not fewer photographs, and it is certainly not none. The question is whose face is in the picture.
Why it lands differently on an international school.
A state school told to publish fewer photographs of its pupils loses very little that it needs.
A fee-paying school in a competitive market loses the thing its admissions depend on. A family relocating from one country to another chooses a school from photographs, a prospectus and a virtual tour, often without ever standing in the building. Your marketing team knows exactly what a page of faces is worth, because it can see what happens to enquiries when the faces come off.
That is the bind.
The safeguarding advice available today asks for distance shots, group shots, shots from behind, blurred faces and fewer names. Every one of those is a real cost to a school that sells an experience.
There is a third option. Publish the photograph. Remove the identity.
What a permission form does. And what it does not.
Every school has a process for this. Consent is sought, it is recorded, and it is checked before an image is used. That is the right process and it is not the problem.
COBIS, the Council of British International Schools, lists a Photography and Media Policy among the policies it expects a member school to hold alongside its child protection policy. Most groups have one, and most of them are good.
Every one of them governs how a photograph is taken and who may take it. Consent decides whether you may publish a child’s image. Neither has anything to say about what happens to that image afterwards.
A signed permission is a record, correctly obtained. 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.
That is the gap Aidos closes, and it is the only one it claims to.
Aidos does not replace your photography policy, your consent process, your retention schedule or your staff training. It does one thing. It removes the identity from the photograph before you publish it.
How your images are handled.
- Images are encrypted during upload and during download.
- Processing takes place on secure infrastructure hosted in the EU (Amazon Web Services).
- Images uploaded by settings are never used to train models.
- Aidos is a closed system, so images can only be uploaded and viewed from inside an authenticated account.
On sending data out of your country.
If your group is subject to a transfer restriction, and a group operating in the Gulf or in Southeast Asia usually is, your data protection officer will want the EU answer in writing before anything else on this page matters. Ask us at the start rather than at contract stage. We would rather that question came early.
“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.”
See what Aidos does to a photograph you have already published
Before. The original photograph carries the child’s real facial identity.
After Aidos. The uniform, the setting and the moment remain. The real face has been replaced with a realistic synthetic face.
Before and after images use licensed stock photography. No pupil from any school appears on this page.
Try Aidos on an image from your own school
Run a photograph already on your website, 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 varies by country. Write to aidos@aidosprotects.com and we will send you the figures for yours.