“I feel like I’m gonna be a senior citizen rather than a high school senior by the time I get them,” one student wrote about their photos. That’s an important part of the business when you’re a school photographer: delivering students’ photos to them, preferably before they graduate. One school photo company in California failed to do that this school year, and families are upset.

Unlike, say, weddings, school photography is a business where a photographer can expect their customer (the school) to come back every year. However, another photographer told CBS Sacramento, that won’t happen if a company fails to deliver the pictures as promised.

While students at one school, Modesto High School, at least have their photo proofs, they don’t have the prints that they ordered. This kind of delay would have been unacceptable even back before most students brought their own high-resolution cameras to school every day.

Families filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau, but if the school had threatened not to bring the photographer back this year, that would have been much scarier threat. The owner of the company, which was still advertising on its website that it was looking for new business, blamed production delays, and managed to get photos out to one family that complained to the TV station’s consumer advocate before the story aired. Good timing.

Call Kurtis: Where Are My Senior Portraits? [CBS Sacramento]

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