About
Built in New Zealand, for rooms full of people
PopStudio is made by System Advance Limited, a New Zealand company. We build one thing, and we build it for the person standing behind the camera at 8pm on a Friday.
Image placeholder
Founder at a real station, mid-event
Landscape 3:2. Warm, available light, not a studio portrait. Camera on a tripod tethered to a laptop, a queue of people just out of focus behind. Honest and slightly unglamorous.
Why we built it
The photos took days, and someone had to match numbers to faces by hand
This did not start as a software idea. It started as an actual photo station at actual church events — a camera, a backdrop, a couple of lights, and a volunteer taking portraits of everyone who walked past.
The photography part worked. Everything after it did not.
Someone would take the card home. Someone would cull and edit. Someone would try to work out which photo belonged to which person, usually from a clipboard with numbers on it and a vague memory of who was wearing what. Then a folder link would go out to the whole group, days later, and people would scroll through hundreds of strangers looking for themselves.
By the time the photos arrived, the night was over. The moment had gone cold. Half the people never bothered opening the link, and the volunteer who had spent their Saturday on it quietly decided not to do it again.
The photography was never the bottleneck. The handover was.
So we built the handover. A guest scans a static QR sign, puts in their name and email, and gets a five-character code. The operator types the code, shoots, taps Done. The photo develops and lands in their inbox in about a minute, as a link to their own page with downloads and a delete button.
No clipboard. No matching session at midnight. No folder of strangers.
What we refuse to build
No biometrics. Not now, not as a feature request.
There is an obvious shortcut in this product. Point a face-recognition model at the photos, match everyone automatically, skip the code entirely. It would be easier to build than what we did build.
We are not going to do it. This is a stated company position, not a roadmap item we have not got to yet.
- No facial recognition or facial matching. Ever.
- No faceprints or biometric templates. We do not create them, so we cannot store, leak or be compelled to hand them over.
- No age, emotion, gender or ethnicity estimation from anybody's face.
- No customer running recognition on PopStudio output. It is in our terms.
The reason is simple. Our customers photograph children at youth nights, families at community days, and congregations who did not sign up to be in anybody's face database. A five-character code typed by a human is slightly more work and enormously less risk. We will take that trade every time.
If you need face matching, we are genuinely the wrong product for you, and we would rather tell you that up front than sell you something and quietly change our minds later.
Where we are
Aotearoa New Zealand
We are based in New Zealand and we serve New Zealand and Australia. That is a deliberate limit while we are small: two markets we understand, with privacy regimes we can actually hold ourselves to — the Privacy Act 2020 and the Australian Privacy Principles.
Prices are in New Zealand dollars, excluding GST. Support runs on New Zealand time, which means we are awake when your Friday night event is on.
The whole thing is built on Cloudflare, which is why the site is fast and why our sub-processor list is two names long.
Company details
- Legal entity
- System Advance Limited
- Trading as
- PopStudio
- Incorporated in
- New Zealand
- NZBN
- [NZBN to be added]
- Registered office
- [registered office address to be added]
- GST number
- [GST number to be added]
- Serving
- New Zealand and Australia
- General enquiries
- hello@popstudioapp.com
- Privacy requests
- privacy@popstudioapp.com
Anything in square brackets is a placeholder we have not filled in yet. We would rather show you a gap than a made-up number.
Come and talk to us
We would rather hear about your event than send you a brochure
If you are weighing this up for a church night, a school gala, a market stall or a run of mini sessions, tell us what you are trying to do and we will tell you honestly whether PopStudio fits. Sometimes it does not, and we will say so.