The New York Giants Built a Player-First Content Engine with PhotoShelter

Building legacy with visual content

The New York Giants are one of the NFL’s most iconic teams, headquartered at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center and playing home games at MetLife Stadium. With a legacy stretching back to 1925, the organization operates in one of the league’s most visible markets. As their creative team and content needs grew, so did the challenge of managing and distributing a rapidly expanding photo library. 

The challenge: Old tools couldn’t keep up with new demands

Matt Swensen, Senior Creative Director, and Brennan Asplen, Manager of Photography, lead the Giants’ creative efforts across the marketing department. On game days and beyond, they’re responsible for capturing and sharing compelling images fast, both internally and with players. But without a proper system, the process was slow. 

Here’s what that looked like:

• Too many requests, no single source of truth. “Before 2019, we didn’t really have any type of DAM at all,” said Swensen. “We were the library.” Assets were stored locally on hard drives. Every department had to go through the creative team for access, often resulting in delays and repeated manual work.
• No self-serve access for departments. Departments needed stadium photos, marketing images, and more, but couldn’t search or pull anything on their own. As Swensen described, requests arrived by email and then required manual zipping and sending. “It was really just a big waste of time to keep going back and forth.”
• No easy player photo distribution. Swensen used to manually collect, download, and send galleries, often by text. There was no automation, no notifications, and no way to scale.

“Fielding photo requests was all through email. People would request some stadium images for marketing or sales, and we would pull the best photos we could, shoot that over in a ZIP file, and things would get lost.”

Matt Swensen, Senior Creative Director, New York Giants

The solution: An easy-to-search library and an automated workflow

Before PhotoShelter, everything was done manually. Now, every photo is easily accessible, usable, and shareable across the organization and directly with the players.

Here’s how they made it work:

• One system scaled across the organization. What started as a tool for the creative team expanded across half the organization. “At first, we had no intention of expanding, but fast forward to today… It’s a huge asset for us,” said Swensen. The DAM now supports teams across departments, from social to sales.
• Simple, organized, and self-serve. The library is structured by year, event, and category. As Asplen put it: “Everyone knows how to use PhotoShelter. At the end of the day, everyone can find what they’re looking for. And it’s super simple.”
• AI-powered visual search saves time. Even when images aren’t perfectly tagged, AI Visual Search fills in the gaps. “You can use it for words like ‘smile,’ ‘stadium wide,’ or ‘fireworks,’” Swensen said. “It catches a lot of them.”

• Automated delivery to players after every game. Content distribution makes player delivery seamless. With PhotoShelter’s distribution platform, “Brennan just sends the photos directly to the players and we see them posted on social pretty quickly,” Swensen explained. Distribution is now part of player onboarding, with automated galleries built from captions and metadata.
• Saves time, boosts brand, and keeps players happy. “It’s off our hands and they’re able to use it whenever they need to,” said Asplen. “It’s so cool how it’s all through PhotoShelter… It’s only gonna get better.”

“Right now, PhotoShelter basically pulls every image that we upload that has a player tag on it, and it looks for those names in the captions or keywords. Then it automatically pulls that into the content distribution platform, ready to send to the players. We want to get them as many images as possible.”

Matt Swensen, Senior Creative Director, New York Giants

Built for speed, scale, and storytelling

The Giants’ creative team turned a slow, manual photo delivery system into a modern, scalable engine. With PhotoShelter, they’ve built a visual workflow that’s player-first, department-friendly, and ready to grow.

“PhotoShelter plays a critical role in our day-to-day lives. We make sure to put as much metadata and specific information as we can on our images so that every department can find what they’re looking for as fast as they can… We really use it as our key library for everything.”

Matt Swensen, Senior Creative Director, New York Giants