How UF Health Manages Visuals for a Massive Hospital Network

Delivering patient care through better visual storytelling

UF Health is a premier network of 12 hospitals and more than 30,000 staff members dedicated to high-quality patient care and research. It is a massive operation that produces a huge volume of visual content to support their clinical work and national reputation. To keep up with this scale, they needed a reliable system to organize and share files across hundreds of practices.

The challenge: The struggles of managing media in a large healthcare system

Staff Photographers Nate Guidry and Hannah Clark are responsible for capturing and managing visual content that serves the entire hospital system. Because the network is so large, manual workflows are simply not an option. Without a dedicated system, the team would face major hurdles in distributing large files and ensuring patient privacy.

• Sending large files was unreliable. If files are too large for email attachments, the team would have to rely on third-party tools. Without a dedicated portal, it is difficult to reliably share high-resolution assets with internal teams and partners.
• Physical hard drives can fail. The team was constantly moving away from unreliable physical storage methods that break over time. Nate recalled storing images on “external hard drives that would break every year.” Those file storage methods put the entire history of the hospital at risk.
• Using photos of former staff creates liability issues. Using an image of a doctor who has left the organization can mislead patients. As Hannah put it, “You cannot use an image of a doctor once they are gone… It implies they work here.” After a doctor leaves, the team needs to make those images inaccessible while preserving the full archive.
• Tracking assets manually is not an option. Because the organization is so large, Hannah emphasizes that without a central search tool, “it would be challenging to keep up with who has what.”

“If you have to send more than what attaches in an email, the only real option is WeTransfer, but you can’t do that consistently… It’s nice to be able to put assets all in one place, in PhotoShelter. We don’t have to worry if our files are too big.”

Hannah Clark, Staff Photographer, University of Florida Health

The solution: Building a central library for the entire hospital network

By using PhotoShelter, the team operates a centralized, secure platform to manage UF Health’s entire archive.

• Staff can find their own content. PhotoShelter makes it easy for authorized users to find what they need without emailing the photographers. Nate explained the structure: “Each college has its own folder, and within that, subfolders based on specific departments,” allowing people to access their content at any time.
• Strict permissions keep departments separate. The platform permissions allow the team to control exactly who sees what. Nate confirms, “Not everyone in the College of Medicine would have access to images from the College of Dentistry.” This ensures sensitive or irrelevant content isn’t shared broadly.

• Search works because data transfers automatically. PhotoShelter automatically captures metadata, which is essential for making a large archive searchable. Hannah noted, “We export from Lightroom and all of that information goes straight into PhotoShelter,” so no data is lost in the move.
• The team simplified how they handle staff headshots. They consolidated their headshot process by using a single folder for each year and emailing images directly to people, rather than creating hundreds of individual galleries. Nate says, “We stopped making individual folders because it became a hassle… now we put everything into a general headshot folder” to save time.

“People who work in each college have access, so they can go into PhotoShelter and know exactly what’s in their folder… It has streamlined the workflow and made the distribution of images much easier and quicker.”

Nate Guidry, Staff Photographer, University of Florida Health

A one-stop shop for healthcare assets

For UF Health, PhotoShelter prevents the risks of a fragmented workflow. The platform provides the necessary control to manage a massive archive while ensuring that appropriate visual content is easily accessible across the entire system.

“I can’t think of a better platform. PhotoShelter is easy to use and extremely effective.”

Nate Guidry, Staff Photographer, University of Florida Health