Pittsburgh Steelers Gain Major Yardage in Real-Time Workflows with PhotoShelter

New game plan for visual content

The Pittsburgh Steelers have built a legendary NFL franchise, with six Super Bowl titles and eight AFC championships to their name. Their dedicated “Steeler Nation” fans pack Acrisure Stadium for home games, where every play and team interaction creates a constant stream of pictures and videos. For a team of this size and impact, the job of capturing these moments and quickly sharing them with players and internal staff had become a major challenge. The Steelers’ photography team knew they urgently needed a stronger, faster system to manage their collection and speed up distribution.

The Challenge: Fumbles in asset management

Karl Roser, Manager of Photography for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and his team are responsible for capturing and distributing all the visual action. Their daily work involves capturing incredible moments and ensuring they reach the right people quickly. The existing processes for handling the large volume of photos created several operational problems. 

• Overwhelming individual photo requests. Responding to each player’s image requests generated a flood of text messages, emails, and direct messages, which was a significant drain on resources. 
• Slow post-game image processing. After every game, Karl had the painstaking task of going through hundreds of images, identifying players, and uploading them individually. 
• Time-consuming manual efforts for a small team. These manual processes were too time-consuming for Karl and his small team. Karl noted, “It was important for me to save on my time…to free me up to allow me to photograph instead of working through images and sending them out.”

The Solution: The Steelers’ playbook for a winning photo strategy

The previous method of managing photos often left the Steelers’ photography team playing catch-up. With PhotoShelter, they executed a game-changing shift to a faster, automated, and more engaging way of handling their visual assets.

• Real-time lens-to-library workflow. Steelers photographers send photos from the field to a photo editor in real time. The editor then quickly edits, tags with relevant metadata, and uploads them to the team’s centralized media library in PhotoShelter. 
• Automated handoffs to players. As soon as images are uploaded to a designated PhotoShelter gallery, they are automatically routed to the players’ phones through PhotoShelter’s content distribution platform. 
• AI spots and tags players for faster sorting. The Steelers utilize PhotoShelter AI, which combines facial recognition and jersey data to automatically recognize athletes and tag them, saving valuable time. 
• Boosted player engagement and brand yardage. Karl is now “more engaged with the players,” who are “communicating with me in advance of game day, asking for specific shots.” When photos “are shared in real time, the players are excited about it and so is their fanbase,” which helps the Steelers brand as well. Karl also mentioned, “There are so many images that we as a team don’t necessarily use…when we’re pushing them out, it gives more opportunities for us to use them.”

The Steelers celebrate a well-earned win with PhotoShelter

For the Pittsburgh Steelers, the frustrating era of photo delays and workflow bottlenecks is decisively over. All teams want greater fan engagement and a stronger brand, and the Steelers understood that victory in this area starts with preparation.

“It’s not the will to win that matters—everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.” Thinking about this quote from Coach Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, the Steelers showcased their commitment by investing in the right tools and setting up their team for success. Karl Roser and his photography team now operate with game-changing speed and precision, delivering exciting moments from the field to players and fans almost instantly. 

Learn how the Pittsburgh Steelers set up a real-time workflow to get photos from the game to the hands of their social media and marketing teams with PhotoShelter and how they go even further to distribute photos to their athletes leveraging the platform.