I'm with SRL: don't punish the student for the relatives' lack of consideration. So it's a large venue. Doesn't matter. Announce it beforehand, and at the first hint of a disruption, halt the ceremony and announce on the PA that the ceremony will resume after the troublemakers have been ejected. The whole audience's attention will be focused on the miscreants. You can bet that everyone else will get the message. Two benefits: it addresses the problem at this year's ceremony instead of only being a deterrent for next year's, and it doesn't punish someone who did nothing wrong in the process.
Just as rude in my opinion are the people who leave after their kid walks across the stage. I had a good friend who graduated
summa 
laude. Her last name began with "W". The graduates were called alphabetically, and there were several hundred. When her big moment came the civic center was three-fourths empty. Grads in the early part of the alphabet received standing o's when they were called with a
summa or a
magna. Peggy got a smattering of applause. She worked as hard as any kid in the As and Bs. Her family had to endure all the earlier families getting up and squeezing out past them.
Now, what about the point of this thread? Again: the tendency, of which the flower story is illustrative, of administrators and bureaucrats in far too many cases to attempt to deal with problems by mindlessly enforcing some well-intentioned but ill-thought-out policy, to the point it becomes a
reductio ad absurdum featured in a rant like my opening post?
To put it another way: the purpose of a rule or policy is, or ought to be, to achieve some purpose, not to be an end in itself. The purpose of that photo policy was to prevent inappropriate images. The purpose was lost sight of in the application to a completely harmless, in no way inappropriate image. In a nutshell, as the photog said, they threw common sense out the window.
