Children’s Museum Houston Curates 1M Stories with PhotoShelter

A new workflow for sharing community moments

Children’s Museum Houston serves over 1 million children and families each year. As one of the most visited museums of its kind, it plays a key role in hands-on education across Greater Houston. But as a nonprofit with limited resources and a massive photo archive, the team struggled to manage content efficiently. After nearly two decades of manual workarounds, they finally found a better way to organize, access, and share images.

The challenge: Houston, we have too many photos

Henry Yau, VP of PR, handles everything from press to marketing to internal content requests. He’s been with the museum for 18 years and knows the archive better than anyone. Unfortunately, he also had to manage it alone without a scalable system.

Here’s what he was dealing with:

• One person managing everything. Henry was responsible for collecting, storing, and distributing all content, despite multiple departments capturing photos for their own needs. “We have different departments taking photos for our outreach, programming, and publicity… and of course, that person managing it was me,” he said.
• No search or tagging capabilities. Photos lived on a server with no metadata, keyword tags, or filters. “If you’re looking for something you might not know the title of, like an event, that makes it really difficult,” Henry said. They couldn’t locate assets efficiently, which made even simple requests a time drain.
• Inconsistent uploads with no quality control. Everyone had their own way of storing and sharing files. “We had tons of photos that people were just saving in random places,” Henry explained. “It became this big giant mess on the server, and then you had no quality control.”
• No dedicated system owner or structure. Without someone to maintain the archive, there was no real accountability. There were no standards for where or how to store photos, and even when guidelines existed, they didn’t stick. Staff turnover meant processes were forgotten or ignored.
• Too much back-and-forth when sharing content. Anytime someone needed photos, they had to ask Henry. He would search manually, sort through options, and send files via email. “We always get pushed to the bottom because they know we can think outside the box,” Henry said. “But our server didn’t have keyword and search capabilities. That’s something we’ve always wanted.”

“I think the biggest challenge for the Children’s Museum is that we have a lot of people taking photos. We have different departments taking photos for our outreach, different departments taking photos for our programming at the museum. And then you have our department, which is taking photos for marketing and communications that we use for publicity. So there’s tons of content that has been created in the last 18 years when I started working here. And I knew that it was gonna be an issue.” 

Henry Yau, VP of PR, Children’s Museum Houston

The solution: Smart systems and self-serve access

Before PhotoShelter, content was buried. Now it’s searchable, curated, and available to everyone who needs it. With a dedicated curator and a digital asset management system in place, the entire workflow changed for the better.

Here’s how they fixed it:

• Added a dedicated curator to manage the library. Henry brought on Cody Duty, a longtime freelance photographer, as the system’s curator. “I assigned this to Cody as our curator,” he said. “I want them to have good, curated photos and not just a dumping ground.” That move helped give the archive structure and ownership for the first time.
• Switched to a searchable archive with AI tools. PhotoShelter’s AI tagging and visual search eliminated the need for manual digging. “I don’t even go to the server anymore,” Henry said. “I just go to PhotoShelter, type in the keyword, and BAM—photos appear.” Even untagged files are easily found thanks to the platform’s AI-powered search.

• Established upload guidelines and approval. Now, departmental collaborators upload photos directly into PhotoShelter. Cody reviews the uploads, curates what’s worth keeping, and filters out the rest. “We don’t need the full 200–400 photos they’ve taken,” Henry said. “Now we have assigned collaborators, and Cody can go through and make selections.”
• Created a centralized system that everyone could use. With PhotoShelter, every department works from the same library. Photos are tagged by event, exhibit, program, or campaign. “The access to keywording capabilities really just makes things so simple,” Henry said. “We can tag the photos by their events, and even if they’re not tagged properly, that AI search feature makes it so much easier.”

• Replaced manual requests with self-serve access. Now, when someone needs content, they don’t go through Henry. “Nobody has to go through me,” he said. “They literally can just go to PhotoShelter and dig through every time we upload, at any time.” Sharing links is easy, and the system supports everyone.

“The biggest thing is really the time saving aspect… PhotoShelter is basically an active system, so people are constantly adding photos to it. They don’t even have to come to me to ask. They just go in directly and find the photos that they need.”

Henry Yau, VP of PR, Children’s Museum Houston

Honoring the past while powering the future

The museum finally has a photo system that matches the scale of its work. Teams are faster. Content is cleaner. And Henry isn’t the only one holding it all together.

“We love having PhotoShelter as our archive system that lives on the cloud. Anybody can access it from anywhere, even at a conference or an outreach program offsite. And they don’t have to have connectivity to our server to access our photos.”

Henry Yau, VP of PR, Children’s Museum Houston