How Harpeth Hall Moved to the Top of the Class with a Smarter Workflow

Graduating from an outdated asset management system

Harpeth Hall is an independent, college preparatory school for girls in grades 5-12 in Nashville, Tennessee. The school serves over 720 students across its 44-acre campus. As the school’s marketing team produced more visual content, its existing system of server drives became a significant operational bottleneck. The team needed a centralized, searchable platform to manage its growing asset library and improve its creative workflow.

The challenge: A disorganized and unsearchable asset library

Jessica Bliss, the Director of Marketing and Communications, oversees an in-house team that functions like a small agency for the school. Her team’s previous workflow for managing photos relied on disconnected server drives, which made finding assets a frustrating and manual process. A subsequent move to a different asset management platform failed to solve their problems; the system was unreliable and slowed down their production schedule. The team faced several key obstacles to an efficient workflow.

• Finding the right photo took too long. Their server drives had no search tool, which was a “big suck on our time.” The team had to manually “go back and try to find specific archival photos, or photos of specific students from years ago.” 
• Their old asset management tool wasn’t unreliable. They tried another platform, but it was often unusable. This was “hampering our ability to do our jobs” and “slowing down our production schedule.” 
• Working with other teams was difficult. The marketing team had no single place to work with departments like admissions on school projects. Sharing photos and getting feedback was a disconnected process.

“When we moved forward as a school and hired our full-time photographer/videographer, it was clear to me that we also needed to take a look at how we were organizing our photos, because we knew the influx of photos was going to be greater. [Our old platform] was with a small company, and there were days when we could not use the system appropriately.”

Jessica Bliss, Director of Marketing and Communications, Harpeth Hall

The solution: One place for everything, powered by AI

Unreliable tools and time-consuming searches fractured the team’s workflow. Now, PhotoShelter provides a single, organized platform for their visual assets, improving productivity across the department. Here’s how the team uses PhotoShelter to improve its daily workflow:

• Finding photos is easy with AI search. The team finds AI Visual Search “really, really useful for us.” Instead of guessing folder names, they can “simply search for ‘girl with a microscope,’ for example,” to find exactly what they need.

• Team projects are simpler with Workspaces. The ability to share a Workspace with other teams at Harpeth was one of the key “functionalities that put PhotoShelter ahead of the rest for us.” They can share photos for a project, and other teams can access and comment on them in one place.
• Tagging students and faculty in photos is now automatic. The team uses PeopleID to automatically tag faces in their photos. Jessica calls the AI “scary good with how accurate it is.” It helps them quickly find all photos of a certain student or faculty member, which she says is “really nice.”

• Gathering photos from students is easy. For a school program that involves student travel, participants submit photos using Google Drive. The PhotoShelter integration automatically adds those photos to their library. Jessica says this was a “real bonus for us” and one of the features that “really sold PhotoShelter above some of the other platforms.”

“We use PhotoShelter as a storage and archival system for all of our assets, and we use it day-to-day… Everything that we take on campus is uploaded into the folder system in our library. And we’re going back and transferring our archival photos, too.”

Jessica Bliss, Director of Marketing and Communications, Harpeth Hall

Telling the school’s story, faster

PhotoShelter gives the Harpeth Hall marketing team the tools to manage photos and work better with other departments. Hours once lost to searching for the right image are now reclaimed. That speed allows the team to be more responsive and productive, easily handling requests from across the school. With the workflow friction gone, they can now focus on what really matters: telling the compelling stories of Harpeth Hall’s students and faculty.

“PhotoShelter has definitely made our team more efficient. We’re always looking for ways to improve our productivity. We serve our entire school, community, and departments across campus. We have a lot of requests that come in, and a lot of things that we produce every year, so to be the most responsive, in the best way that we can, helps us all. That way, we’re not bogged down for hours, searching for photos. PhotoShelter has directly impacted our ability to do that more quickly, which then helps us do our jobs better.”

Jessica Bliss, Director of Marketing and Communications, Harpeth Hall