Crew get a face: selfies on the portal and person-based avatars everywhere

Crew lists used to be initials in circles, and the initials were the company’s. A contact named Sally Kent working for Basic Productions showed up as “BP” everywhere she appeared. This batch turns those circles into people.

Crew add their own photo

From their portal, a crew member can open a “Your photo” card and add a selfie. They can replace or remove it any time. The photo becomes their avatar: it shows in the portal header, on the planner’s crew list, and on the share-link panels. Faces against names is a small thing until you’re running a door at check-in with thirty crew you’ve never met.

Planners can do it on a crew member’s behalf too, from the contact form’s photo section, for the supplier who will never get around to it but whose face you want on the list anyway.

The upload is deliberately low-friction. The image is resized to about 400px in the browser before it leaves the phone, which strips the EXIF location data at the same time, so you’re not shipping someone’s home coordinates to a server. iPhone HEIC photos are detected and politely rejected with a note to export as JPEG, rather than failing silently.

Avatars are the person now, not the company

Everywhere an avatar renders (the contacts list, the planner’s photo section, the crew portal header, the share-links panel) it now represents the person. The initials fall back to the person’s first and last name, not the company’s, so Sally Kent reads as “SK” instead of her employer’s “BP”. Company-only contacts without a person name still work exactly as before.

The contact form also gained a context header above its tabs, showing the company alongside the person’s name, so you always know who you’re looking at no matter which tab you’re on.

Where the photos live

Selfies are treated as crew identity. They’re cleaned up with the rest of an account when it’s deleted or swept for inactivity, and they’re included in the account data export. They render through a single shared avatar component, circular and center-cropped with an initials fallback, so a missing photo never leaves a hole in the layout.