DAM Horror Stories

Every marketing or creative professional has a horror story. 

Not ghosts or goblins. The real horrors live in your inbox, your server, and that mystery folder labeled “Final_Final_V2.”

Here are four terrifyingly common challenges brands faced before PhotoShelter, and how they finally put their content nightmares to rest.

The asset graveyard

Where files go to die, never to be seen again.

When assets are stored across hard drives, servers, and desktop folders, your team doesn’t know what is available and approved to use. The nightmare? Wasted time on content that never sees the light of day, and even potential costly lawsuits for using expired, copyrighted content.

Barry Wallace, Digital Communication Specialist at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, was using a home-grown internal system that “quickly turned into a nightmare”. Server corruption and viruses had led to the loss of thousands of photos, erasing valuable archives and disrupting workflows.

“Files were scattered everywhere – on thumb drives, external hard drives, and across the network, with no central backup.”

Barry Wallace, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital

The solution: One trusted media library

For East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, PhotoShelter’s cloud-based backups ensure all their assets are safe and accessible from a single, reliable platform. Barry told us, “We never have to worry about losing data again. It’s given us confidence in our system.”

The cursed inbox

Haunted by repetitive requests and tedious tasks.

Marketing departments and photo teams often get bogged down with questions like, ‘Where can I find this photo?’ More often than not, they’re left hand-holding others to find the right assets.

Matt Swensen, Senior Creative Director at the New York Giants, saw photo requests pouring into his inbox. When departments needed stadium photos, marketing images, and more, no one could search or pull anything on their own.

“Fielding photo requests was all through email… and we would pull the best photos we could, shoot that over in a ZIP file, and things would get lost. It was really just a big waste of time to keep going back and forth.”

Matt Swensen, New York Giants

The solution: Self-service access

The New York Giants now have a DAM system with easy access across the organization. Brennan Asplen, Manager of Photography, told us, “Everyone knows how to use PhotoShelter. At the end of the day, everyone can find what they’re looking for. And it’s super simple.”

The unsearchable archive

When metadata madness takes its toll.

An image is only valuable if you can find it. Without consistent keywording or AI-powered indexing, teams are forced to dig manually or recreate content that already exists.

Steven Bridges, Manager of Photography at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, used to tag images manually, guessing which search terms others might use. The process was time-consuming and often left users struggling to find what they needed.

“When we have over a thousand people looking for random assets, I don’t have the time to write in every possible tag they may think to look for.”

Steven Bridges, University of Tennessee Knoxville

The solution: Auto-tagging and AI Visual Search

By automating metadata tagging and using AI Visual Search,  Steven and his team at UT Knoxville are finding assets more easily. Now, they can instantly identify the faces of staff and VIPs in photos and find what they’re looking for without relying solely on manual tagging.

The vanishing moment

Missing the moment can be a nightmare.

When you wait hours, or even days, to share highlights from a graduation ceremony, conference, or championship game, the buzz fades and people move on. To capture attention (and keep it), teams need to deliver content in real time.

Jacob Gonzalez, Lead Photographer at Austin FC, used to spend hours after every game transferring photos across platforms and personal hard drives before he could even start editing. It was a post-game curse that added extra work after every match.

“After each game, I would… manually move or add those photos to the right collection. So it took me like half an hour after every game, when I wanted to go home.”

Jacob Gonzalez, Austin FC

The solution: Real-time content delivery

Now, when Austin FC wants to share game-day highlights in real time, they can transfer photos via FTP in seconds directly to PhotoShelter. “We just plug in our Ethernet cables on the field, and we’re good to go. We can send photos anywhere, really,” said Gonzalez.

Is your workflow a nightmare? Book a demo and see how PhotoShelter can help.