How Mount Holyoke College Captures Campus Life and Preserves Its Legacy

Long tradition of leadership and storytelling

Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is the oldest of the Seven Sisters colleges and a leader in liberal arts education. Renowned for shaping leaders, the college serves a diverse, gender-inclusive student body rooted in academic and community excellence. With thousands of photos documenting student life, traditions, and milestones, the Mount Holyoke marketing and communications team needed a better way to organize, protect, and share its visual assets.

The challenge: Organizing and sharing campus assets at scale

Director of Strategic Content, Meghan Stauts, and Chief Photographer, Max Wilhelm, handle event coverage, archiving, and constant image requests from across campus. But scattered storage, restrictive access, and inefficient sharing tools turned routine tasks into daily bottlenecks.

The team faced several pressing challenges:

• Disorganized storage limited access. “At one point, it was just a photo folder on our shared server, and maybe that shifted to Google Drive at another point,” said Stauts. With images scattered across platforms, there was no reliable way to upload, access, or preserve Mount Holyoke’s asset archive.
• Over-controlled permissions hurt collaboration. Stauts noted that earlier versions of the marketing and communications office “were very tightly controlled to a point where folks saw our office as not really being a collaborative campus partner.” Instead of empowering colleagues, restrictive access created frustration and slowed progress.
• No secure way to handle sensitive or high-priority requests. From commencement to visits by public officials, the team required a fast and confidential way to share images. As Wilhelm explained, without PhotoShelter, “we would have made a Google Drive link and added their emails to the permissions list,” a process that lacked both efficiency and security.

“We had photos from the past organized in a very haphazard way on various servers and Google Drive… There was really a need identified for clearer ways to upload photos, for folks to access photos, and for us to keep our own archives moving forward.”

Meghan Stauts, Director of Strategic Content, Marketing & Communications, Mount Holyoke College

The solution: Centralized storage for every story

Before, Mount Holyoke’s photo workflows were fragmented and difficult to manage. Now, with PhotoShelter, the MarCom team runs a streamlined, secure, and collaborative system that benefits the entire campus. Here’s how they turned things around:

• Self-service access with clear permissions. The team shifted to managed access and download tracking, reducing bottlenecks and eliminating one-off requests. “Ensuring people have access to our beautiful photos has helped really shift our internal marketing perception on campus as a partner that is willing to work with folks,” said Stauts.
• Faster, more efficient workflows. With photographers uploading directly into PhotoShelter, approved images were instantly available. “It just cuts out so many middlemen… it’s a shorter pipeline,” Stauts added. “It makes my life a lot easier because I’m not fielding 45 different requests. We can just say, if it’s in Photoshelter, it’s been approved.”
• Confidential sharing when it matters most. PhotoShelter’s password-protected galleries allowed the team to share sensitive assets quickly and securely. Wilhelm recalled a time when, “With PhotoShelter, sharing is a lot easier. I’m able to password-protect [certain assets], which is a huge deal, so we can share select photos with high-level officials.”

• Streamlined collaboration with freelancers. External contributors can upload directly into designated galleries, eliminating back-and-forth file transfers. Wilhelm explained, “It’s great that a third party, an outside freelancer who doesn’t need access to our [entire] library…but needs to be able to contribute, can very easily get to those photos.”
• Analytics that inform creative strategy. Download data revealed surprising insights about what images the campus community valued. As Wilhelm put it, “I realized I should just put everything up there with some curation because you never know when somebody’s going to need a close-up picture of a statuette… Seeing those get downloaded [in PhotoShelter Analytics] and used makes me realize… you don’t always have to swing big.”

“The analytics definitely inform what I upload, and when people ask for photos… I have a better idea of what to provide them when they ask for buildings on campus… I can sort out the best of the best from these lists and these analytics.”

Max Wilhelm, Chief Photographer, Videographer, and Creative Assets Manager, Mount Holyoke College

A photo library that connects the campus

With PhotoShelter, Mount Holyoke’s marketing and communications team turned a scattered, inefficient system into a trusted photo library that supports the entire campus. What was once difficult to find or slow to share is now organized, secure, and easily accessible. Faculty, staff, and leadership can focus on telling the college’s story with confidence, knowing the right images are always at hand.

“I like that PhotoShelter is a place where I can house everything… It’s just so key to distributing photos throughout the entire campus. It’s a small campus, but we field a lot of requests, and we need to manage access for a lot of people.”

Max Wilhelm, Chief Photographer, Videographer, and Creative Assets Manager, Mount Holyoke College