SIMS 7 - Photo extract optimisation

As part of the telemetry review for November 2024 data, I plan to challenge the over 76 million calls to the third party API to get student photos.  Photos are relatively large data items to move around and whilst they add value to many applications, the most common scenario is that they change once a year with an edge case for new pupils and the odd pupil for whatever reason wants to change their 'image' (literally) during the year.

The top of the photo grab, so far, was estimated to grab photos 2580 times per pupil during the month. There may be higher numbers but I don't have an automated way of getting pupil numbers at the time of writing.  To put this in perspective, the average pupil has a 5 hour school day and in November, there were 21 school days... This equates to 25 frames per hour would be a compelling time lapse study.

Our recommendation would be a more chatty interface, exporting all photos monthly and asking for daily top ups for pupils without photos in the consuming system. The assumption being that a handful of pupils join a school each week. Worst case scenario for this would be that there are no photos and a daily request is made to get non-existent photos.   Worst case would then be a daily call to get all photos and best case is no photo requests would be made.  The smaller data exchange and update would be a likely win, win scenario.