DAM Horror Stories 2026

8 true tales from haunted content libraries

Pull up a chair and turn down the lights. Every story here really happened. The teams are real, the quotes are real, and so are the hours people lost searching for a single file.

Each of these teams made it out. Here’s what haunted them, and how they escaped.

100 Minutes Alone in the Folders

Someone famous had passed away, and Butler University’s Creative Director needed a photo of her, fast. Campus Photographer Zach Bolinger went into the folders. Some files had random names. Some had no names at all. “I couldn’t find it, so I had to Google what year she was on campus so I could start in that year’s folder,” he said. “It took me an hour and 40 minutes to find the photo because I wasn’t there. I didn’t know.” Now all of Butler’s photos are in one PhotoShelter library that anyone can search by typing a name, or something like “student plus classroom.” As Zach puts it, “if I’m gone, if Phil’s gone, it doesn’t matter.”

Read Butler’s full story →

The Photos With No Names

The New York Islanders’ photographers cover games, street hockey programs, concerts, and marketing shoots. Then the photos started disappearing. They weren’t deleted; they just had no labels. “A lot of times, things were getting lost by the wayside because there was a sheer lack of metadata,” said Senior Manager of Photography Dennis DaSilva. The team needed a place where it would be easy to find a photo from four years ago. Now they label photos with keyboard shortcuts that add several keywords at once. For the shots nobody labeled, AI Visual Search finds moments like “a mother and daughter or father and son watching a game.” On game days, photos go from the ice to social media in minutes.

Read the Islanders’ full story →

Two Photos, One Face

At the American Board of Radiology, there were two photos of the same board member. One was current, and the other was out of date. With files spread across different computers and folders, nobody could be sure which one they’d grabbed. “Maybe the old photo somehow ended up in there, and somebody would use it for a public purpose,” said Communications Manager Rodney Campbell. Now ABR keeps everything in PhotoShelter, labeled and sorted by subject, and can limit who has access to older files. “It’s been a way to be able to know what assets we have, where they can be found, and where they can be shared, too,” Rodney said.

Read ABR’s full story →

Death by “What Do You Think?”

Topps makes hundreds of trading card products a year, and the photos on them need sign-off from athletes, partners, and the Topps team. Those approvals start with “Emailing a link or an attachment and asking, ‘What do you think?'”, said Director of Photography Alex Trautwig. Then waiting. Meanwhile, the photos themselves were scattered across Box, office servers, and hard drives. “It was all over the place.” Now approvals happen in PhotoShelter Workspaces, where partners see the photos and leave feedback in one spot. “We are using it every single day,” Alex said.

Read Topps’ full story →

Buried in the Filing Cabinets

When Aimee Metcalf moved into Central Oregon Community College’s marketing and PR department, she went looking for the photos. “Our photos were in boxes, and our photos were in filing cabinets, and our digital photos were on everybody’s hard drive,” she said. To share a photo, you emailed it. To find one, you had to ask, “Who has this photo on their computer?” And everyone named files their own way. “Bottom line, it was a mess.” Now every photo goes into one searchable PhotoShelter library. Their writer, web designer, graphic designer, and even their marketing agency use it “almost every day.”

Read COCC’s full story →

The Requests Are Coming From Inside the Building

The messages never stopped. “Hey, I’m looking for this image from 2019, etc. Where is it?” At Applegate, the natural and organic meat brand, those messages went to Senior Graphic Designer Holly Sellner. Each one meant digging through thousands of photos on a slow server. “Just sitting there waiting for the image preview to come up was like torture,” she said, “and it wouldn’t even be the image I was looking for.” Now Applegate’s teams and outside agencies find what they need in PhotoShelter themselves. In Holly’s words, “They can just go and get what they need.”

Read Applegate’s full story →

The Wrong Logo Kept Showing Up

MetroHealth tried giving everyone access to everything. It didn’t go well. “They would select a wrong logo, or an image that we didn’t have the rights to use,” said Brand Marketing Manager Kathy Walters. Nobody could tell which version was current, and one person was stuck handling every request. Now MetroHealth’s approved photos and logos are in one PhotoShelter library, and old logos are filed where only Kathy’s team can see them. Employees get what they need without waiting on marketing. “They don’t have to wait two days for us to get back to them. It’s instantaneous.”

Read MetroHealth’s full story →

A Million Assets Nobody Could See

The Tennessee Titans had more than a million assets, and most of them might as well not have existed. Years of photos arrived in one big, unlabeled pile. “No metadata, nothing tagged,” said Director of Team Photography Donald Page. So people kept reusing the same few images, “because those were easiest to find.” Now anyone at the Titans can find photos by describing them with AI Visual Search, across more than 1.5 million images. “A great image is no good if you can’t find it,” Donald said. “PhotoShelter helps us find our best work.”

Read the Titans’ full story →