Butler Unleashes Fresh Campus Stories with PhotoShelter

The Bulldogs needed a better way to fetch campus moments

Butler University is a private institution with approximately 4,500 undergraduate students. With a tight-knit 11:1 student-to-faculty ratio, the school emphasizes small class sizes alongside vast, big-city internship and research opportunities. It consistently ranks as one of the best regional universities in the Midwest.

The creative and social teams rely on photography to capture campus life and share the university’s story. But their old system wasn’t allowing everyone to work together efficiently.

The challenge: Butler had to dig for every photo

Campus Photographer Zach Bolinger captures Butler’s photography and manages its visual library. Art Director Philip Eichacker and Associate Art Director Alisha Luckenbill use those images in creative projects, while Associate Director of Digital Content Strategy Evan Krauss selects photography for social media and serves as handler of Butler Blue IV, the university’s official live mascot.

Across their different roles, they ran into the same content problems.

• Photos were buried in folders and hard to search. Butler’s photography used to live in server folders that didn’t follow a consistent naming or organizational system. In the old system, files were often randomly named, sometimes not named at all, or “just thrown into a folder that we then had to search through,” explained Philip. The team relied heavily on people knowing the history of events, shoots, folders, and file locations. If someone was new, they could not easily find what they needed.
• Important images would take hours to locate. Zach shared an example from his early days at Butler. “Someone famous had passed away, and our Creative Director needed a photo to post somewhere. 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. It took me an hour and 40 minutes to find the photo because I wasn’t there. I didn’t know.”
• Untagged photos created extra work. Zach explained “We had a request for 10 years of class photos. For the years I’ve been here, I found those class pictures in three minutes. But I had to go back those other five years before PhotoShelter, and I didn’t know where to look. It took an hour or two hours to get those last five photos. It shows the stark difference in findability.”
• Fresh creative was hard to find. Evan says they were defaulting to reusing the same familiar images year after year in their projects.  “In the past, when we would have to search and look with our eyes, sometimes that created a situation where I knew this picture worked in the past, so I would just use it over and over.” 
• Digging for content meant less time designing. Alisha explains “The amount of time it took to find something was a big chunk of what we were doing rather than designing things. You were trying to find the right image for that to work.”

The solution: A photo library fit for the Bulldogs

The college’s images were spread across several platforms, and the team had limited control over levels of access to different audiences. Now, the college has one central library where it can preserve its archive, review sensitive content, and make approved imagery easier to find and share.

• Everyone can find the content they need on their own. “It’s a great system now where if I’m gone, if Phil’s gone, it doesn’t matter,” says Zach. “No one has to have prior knowledge of what things were or when they happened. Now they can be accessed by typing the person’s name in, or if you need a student in a classroom, search ‘student plus classroom.’”
• Smart Galleries surface new student photos. Zach explained just how valuable Smart Galleries have been for their team, “We started using a Smart Gallery, so anything we tag with the word student or students gets thrown in there for three months. That’s helped out greatly, especially for social. When I upload photos from walking around campus, they know these are the last 30 pictures we took outside. For orientation and the first day of school, that gallery is getting populated that day, so they know what to use and what’s new.”

• Download size options save steps for social and design. With Content Derivatives, anyone can download the right file size for the right use case. “Having it all in one is very helpful,” explained Zach. Before, when working with Hootsuite, which has very strict size limits, Zach was, “downloading the highest quality possible, taking it into Photoshop, re-exporting it as a smaller PNG, [and] finding out it’s 21 MB instead of 20.”
• Butler can use fresh creative instead of reusing the same images. The creative team can find new options instead of defaulting to the same familiar images year after year. Alisha says “I use PhotoShelter daily. The way Zach has organized it makes it so easy to find things for me, because the way it’s organized is the way my brain works. It makes it so easy to look through and find things, and then be able to explore and find things I didn’t even know were there.”

• Workspaces help teams collect options and narrow choices. The team can gather image options for campaigns, posters, graduation content, and creative reviews. They also use Workspaces to build project-specific collections that others can return to.

“Sometimes when we choose images, there’s a call to ‘see a few options,’ or ‘Let me see several different examples of this image and I’ll pick the one I like.’ I use Workspaces to give a range of options, narrow down choices, and provide that gamut of choice.”

– Art Director, Butler University

Butler’s old library has learned new tricks

Butler’s photo library now supports the full path from capturing a campus moment to using that moment in a finished story. Zach can organize images to keep them useful over time, while the creative and social teams can find the right options without relying on folder names or institutional memory.

“PhotoShelter’s allowed us to be much more intentional. We’re able to see a broader range of our photography options. If I’m looking for a photo of people walking on campus, I can say, ‘This person doesn’t look super happy,’ or ‘This weather doesn’t match.’ We can be more intentional in our storytelling.”

– Associate Director of Digital Content Strategy, Butler University