Chrome extension

Ward Photo Directory

Turn your ward's member directory into a grid of photo cards. You can flip, sort, filter, group, print and export them, and study them as flash cards to learn names. Leaders and clerks can also add photos to reports in Leader and Clerk Resources and send each member a personalized message.

Getting started

Add the extension to Chrome

Install Ward Photo Directory in Google Chrome, then pin it so its icon stays on your toolbar.

Ward Photo Directory in Chrome Store
Open your ward directory

Sign in at directory.churchofjesuschrist.org and choose your ward or branch so the member list is showing.
Click the toolbar icon

The extension loads everyone in your unit and replaces the page with a photo grid. It all happens in the same tab. Nothing new opens.

On a different website? If you click the icon on a page the extension can't use, you'll see a short message with links to the directory and to Leader and Clerk Resources. Follow a link, sign in, and click the icon again.

For all members

Features for everyone

Anyone with access to the ward directory can use everything in this section.

The photo grid

Every member of your unit gets a card with their photo and name. The grid fills the page, so you can scroll through the whole ward at once. It's a good way to learn the names of new move-ins, or to put faces to the names in your class.

Flip a card for details

Click any card to flip it over. The back shows that member's phone, email, address and callings. Click again to flip it back.

Arrange the cards

To do this	Do this
Move a card anywhere in the grid	Drag it
Send a card to the end	`Alt` / `Option` + click
Hide a card	`Ctrl` / `Cmd` + click
Bring hidden cards back	Menu → Adjust Cards → Restore Hidden Cards
Mix up the order	Menu → Study Members → Shuffle

The back of each card has a row of small icon buttons. Hover over one to see what it does.

Copy Card copies the card so you can paste it somewhere else.
Paste Card Before places a card you copied earlier just before this one.
Hide Card removes the card from the grid, the same as Ctrl+click. Restore Hidden Cards brings it back.
Copy Message and Open in LCR are covered in the leaders & clerks section.

Click the menu icon (☰) in the top-left corner. Hover over any menu item to see a short description of what it does. Click anywhere outside the menu to close it.

The main menu has Instructions & Tools, Filter Cards, and four submenus: Data, Download Images, Study Members and Adjust Cards.

Study Members

Flash Cards: Quizzes you on the cards in the grid, one at a time. See Learn names with flash cards below.
Show / Hide Names: Turns the name label under each photo on or off. Hiding the names turns the grid into a quiz for learning people's names.
Shuffle: Puts the cards in random order.
Hide Missing Photos: Hides members who don't have a photo.

Adjust Cards

Hide Members not Flipped: Keeps only the cards you've flipped and hides the rest. Flip the people you want, then use this to narrow the grid down to them.
Paste Member List: Shows only the members in a list you copied, in the list's order, and hides everyone else. The list can be Member Ids separated by spaces, commas or new lines. If you copy spreadsheet cells with a Member ID column, the ids come from that column and the sheet's other columns are added to the back of each card.
Restore Hidden Cards: Brings back every hidden card, however it was hidden: Ctrl+click, Hide Card, Hide Missing Photos, Hide Members not Flipped, Paste Member List or a filter. It only appears once something has been hidden.
Group / Ungroup By Address: See Households and roommates below.
Flip All Cards: Flips every card over. Cards showing the photo switch to details, and cards showing details switch back to the photo.
Reset Cards: Turns every card back to its photo side.

Learn names with flash cards

Choose Study Members → Flash Cards to study the cards showing in the grid, one at a time. Each card appears large, with the name hidden.

Click the card to show or hide the name.
Hint reveals one more letter of each word in the name every time you click it.
Correct marks the member as known and takes them out of the set.
Incorrect moves on and keeps them in the set.

Cards come in random order. Each pass after the first repeats only the people you haven't gotten right yet. When you know everyone, Start Over begins again. Your progress is remembered until you close the browser tab.

The arrow below the buttons opens more options:

Copy Progress copies a two-column table of Member ID and status (known or unknown). Paste it into a spreadsheet to save it.
Paste Progress reads that table back from the clipboard, shows only those members, and picks up where you left off.
Reset marks everyone in the set unknown and starts a new shuffled session.

Tip: hide or filter the grid first to study a smaller group, such as this semester's move-ins or one class.

Find members with Filter Cards

Filter Cards in the main menu shows only the members who match what you choose. The dialog lists every field found on the back of the cards, such as phone, address, callings or any report or spreadsheet column, with a value box beside each one.

Pick a value from a box's list to match it exactly.
Type your own text to match any value that contains it. Typed text is shown in italics.
Blank matches members with no value for that field. Not Blank matches members who have any value.
Each filled box adds another empty one, with or between them, so you can match several values. When every value in a field is typed text, click the or to change it to and, so a member must match all of them.
The line at the top sets whether a member must match all of the fields you filled in or any of them.

Apply Filter shows every matching card, including cards you hid earlier, and hides the rest. To see everyone again, click Clear All and then Apply Filter. Your choices are remembered until you close the browser tab, so the dialog opens where you left off.

Households and roommates

Group By Address puts everyone who shares an address into one box, with the address along the bottom. It's a quick way to see families and roommates together.

Grouping also adds a Roommate Count to the back of every card, which is the number of members at that address. Cards for people who share an address also get a Roommates list. Ungroup By Address returns the cards to a normal grid, and those added details stay on the cards.

Card size and spacing

Open Instructions & Tools from the menu and choose the Appearance tab.

Zoom In / Zoom Out makes the cards bigger or smaller, which changes how many fit in each row.
Increase / Decrease Spacing widens or narrows the gap between cards.

Print or save as PDF

Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) to print the grid, or choose Save as PDF in the print dialog. The menu and buttons are left off the printed page automatically, and each card gets a thin border. Set the zoom and spacing first to control how many cards fit on each sheet.

A printed photo sheet is handy for a class roll, a new teacher, or a welcome committee.

Take the list to a spreadsheet

The Data submenu in the menu has two ways to export:

Download CSV saves the cards showing in the grid as a file you can open in Excel or Google Sheets. It has one row per member with Member Id, given name, surname, phone, email and callings.
Copy for Spreadsheet copies the same data to the clipboard, ready to paste into a sheet.

Download everyone's photos

Choose Download Images in the menu, then pick how the files should be named:

Member Name names each photo after the member, such as Smith, John.jpg.
Member ID names each photo with the member's directory ID, which is handy for matching photos to a spreadsheet.

You get one .zip file with the photo of every card still showing in the grid. Hidden cards and members without a photo are left out, so hide cards first to download just the people you need. Download Images is only on the ward-directory grid, not on grids built from LCR reports.

Closing the grid

Click the ✕ in the top-right corner to close the grid. The original directory page comes right back without reloading. Refreshing the page or navigating away also removes the grid. Click the toolbar icon again to rebuild it.

For leaders & clerks

Features for Leader and Clerk Resources

These features work with lcr.churchofjesuschrist.org, which only leaders and clerks can open. The messaging tools also work on the ward-directory grid, but they're built for the kind of member outreach that leaders and clerks do most.

Stay signed in to the directory too. Member photos are always loaded from the ward directory site. If photos don't appear on an LCR page, sign in at directory.churchofjesuschrist.org in another tab and try again.

Put faces on any LCR report

Open any member list or report in LCR, such as a class roll, a ministering list or a custom report, and click the toolbar icon. The extension finds the table of members on the page and asks what you'd like to do.

Insert Images

Adds a Photo column to the front of every table on the page, right where you are. Pick Small, Medium or Large photos. Running it again replaces the column instead of adding a second one.

Show Image Cards

Turns the report into a photo grid. The back of each card shows that report's columns, and the grid is titled after the report. Every grid feature above works here too. Group By Address uses any report column with “Address” in its name.

Jump to a member's LCR record

The Open in LCR button on the back of every card opens that member's profile in Leader and Clerk Resources in a new tab.

Personalized messages

Write a message once and fill in each member's details automatically. It's useful for invitations, reminders, interview scheduling and welcome notes. The extension doesn't send anything itself. It shows you each member's version of the message to review, puts it on your clipboard, and you paste it into your text or email app.

1. Write the message

Open Instructions & Tools from the menu and choose the Messages tab. Type your message, and mark the places where member details belong with tags. A tag is a field name in capital letters inside angle brackets:

Hi <FIRST NAME>, we'd love to visit you this Sunday at <ADDRESS>. Does 4:00 work?

The tags available for the current grid appear as buttons. Click one to insert it where your cursor is. The ward-directory grid offers <FULL NAME>, <FIRST NAME>, <LAST NAME>, <PHONE>, <EMAIL>, <ADDRESS> and <CALLINGS>. On a grid built from an LCR report, every column in the report becomes a tag. For example, a column called “Last Interview” becomes <LAST INTERVIEW>.

2. Keep several messages

Each message gets its own tab. Click + to add one, click a tab's name to rename it, and click its ✕ to delete it. You might keep a “Welcome” message, an “Interview” message and a “Reminder” message ready to go.

3. Review and copy it for each member

Flip a member's card and click Copy Message. A window opens with the message filled in with that member's details. You can change the wording before you copy it.

The Message list at the top starts on the message showing in the Messages tab. Pick a different one to fill that one in instead.
Copy Message copies the message to your clipboard. Paste it into a text or email.
Log Message and Copy and Log appear when the message has a Google Form link. See Track outreach with a Google Form below.
Cancel closes the window without copying or logging anything.

Copy Message, with the message list open

Where messages are saved. Messages are saved in your browser on this computer. The ward directory and LCR each keep their own set, so messages you write on one site won't appear on the other.

Track outreach with a Google Form

Each message can also have a Google Form prefilled link. When it's set, the Copy Message window gets two more buttons. Log Message sends a response to your form, and Copy and Log copies the message and sends the response in one click. The form's response sheet becomes a running record of who was contacted, when, and with which message. Whatever you changed in the window is what gets logged.

Each message has its own form link, so paste it into every message you want to log. Several messages can share the same form. The messagetitle field records which one was sent.

In your Google Form, open the ⋮ menu and choose Get pre-filled link.
For each question, type the name of the field it should receive:
- name for the member's name
- message for the filled-in message
- memberid for the member's directory ID
- messagetitle for the name of the message tab
- any card field, such as phone, email or address
Matching ignores capitals and spaces. Any other question keeps the answer you typed.
Copy the full link, which starts with https://docs.google.com/forms/, and paste it into the message's Google Form box. A shortened forms.gle link won't work.

Each submission briefly opens a small window, because the Church's sites block a completely silent submission. If nothing is recorded, allow pop-ups for the site in Chrome.

Setting up a prefilled link in Google Forms

Bring in your own data

Add columns from a spreadsheet to the cards, such as interview dates, assignments or class names. You can then show them on the cards and use them as message tags. The spreadsheet needs one column named Member Id. The other columns can be called anything.

Tip: start with Download CSV. It gives you a sheet with everyone's Member Id already filled in. Add your columns and bring it back.

Quick import

Open the menu's Data submenu and choose Paste from Spreadsheet (after copying cells) or Upload CSV. The new columns are added straight to the matching cards. Rows that don't match a card are ignored.

Import with preview

For more control, use Import Values at the bottom of the Messages tab:

Paste or upload your data and check the preview table before anything changes.
Choose whether Member Ids with no matching card should create new cards or be ignored.
Tick Clear all cards before applying values to build the grid from your spreadsheet alone.
Show Example and Download Example give you a correctly formatted starting file.

Imported columns become tags right away. A column called “Interview Time” can go straight into a message as <INTERVIEW TIME>.

Example: scheduling tithing declaration

Download the CSV. Keep the Member Id column, add an Appointment column with each person's time, and delete the other columns.
Paste it back in with Paste from Spreadsheet.
Write the message: Hi <FIRST NAME>, your appointment with the bishop is <APPOINTMENT>.
Add a Google Form link to log each invitation.
Go down the grid. Click Copy Message on each card, then Copy and Log, and paste the message into a text.

Privacy and permissions

You only see what you can already see. The extension uses your own signed-in session on the Church's sites. It never asks for, sees or stores your password.
Data stays in your browser. Member information is read from the Church's own sites and shown in your tab. Nothing is sent anywhere else, except the Google Form responses you set up yourself.
Minimal permissions. The extension can only act on the tab where you click its icon, and only at that moment. It has no access to your other tabs or your browsing.
Nothing is changed on Church sites. The grid only changes what your own browser shows. Closing it restores the original page.

For the full details, read the privacy policy.

Feedback and feature requests

Found something confusing, something broken, or something you wish it did? Let me know. Every field is optional. Leave your email or phone number only if you'd like me to get back to you.

About me

I'm a retired professor of information systems from Brigham Young University. I wrote Ward Photo Directory while serving as the bishop of a young single adult ward.

A YSA ward changes constantly. New members move in every semester, and learning names and faces quickly matters. I built this tool to make that easier for me and the leaders I served with. I hope it helps you get to know the people you serve, too.

If the extension has been useful to you, you're welcome to buy me an herbal tea at the link below.