University of Louisville Athletics Capture the Win with PhotoShelter

The Louisville Cardinals’ visual legacy

The University of Louisville Athletics, known as the Louisville Cardinals, competes in NCAA Division I as a proud Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) member. Their dynamic athletic program has a rich history of competition, requiring meticulous management of extensive visual assets. With thousands of assets generated at each event, Louisville Athletics needed a reliable, efficient system to organize, share, and preserve their content. 

The challenge: Outdated asset management

Taris Smith, Staff Photographer, oversees capturing high-quality images of athletes, fans, and significant moments during games and events. The daily tasks involve photographing events, editing images, and responding to asset requests from marketing, social media, and other departments. Without a modern digital asset management system, Taris struggled to efficiently organize, find, or share photos.

• Old storage methods risked losing history. Photos stored on CDs and hard drives got damaged over time. This meant important images could be lost forever. Taris explained, “We’re trying to get that stuff to live in a digital place and not on a CD that hasn’t been touched in 10+ years.” Saving these photos digitally became very important to keep their history safe.
• Photos were hard to find without tags. It was tough to find specific photos without keywords or metadata. Files had random names, which meant finding the right picture took a long time, slowing everyone down.
• Sharing photos took too long. Team members needed photos quickly, especially during events. But without a mobile-friendly system, they had trouble getting photos fast enough for social media posts and other urgent needs.

“A lot of our old CDs and hard drives are just made up of random file names, without any metadata attached to them. So, whenever we’re asked to go back, it’s really hard sometimes to try to narrow down what you’re looking for, because there is no structure or organization.”

Taris Smith, Staff Photographer, University of Louisville Athletics

The solution: A picture-perfect playbook with modern workflows 

PhotoShelter made photo management simple, improving teamwork and saving important images for the future. Here’s what changed:

• Important photos are now safe and easy to find. With PhotoShelter, historical photos are protected and organized. Taris uses Photo Mechanic to add helpful tags and keywords. “The biggest jump for us has been the application of metadata,” Taris says. “Now, if you’re looking for Lamar Jackson, ‘celebration,’ or ‘fans,’ you can easily find what you need.”

• Tags made searching fast and easy. Anyone can quickly find and use images because the system is easy to understand, helping everyone work faster. Taris says, “We’re adding essentially anything that we think would be searchable, especially for people who don’t work in marketing or creative services. We try to make it dummy-proof so if anyone’s looking for something specific, they’ll be able to find it.”
• Collaboration improved across all departments. Every department has direct access to the photos they need. “It’s really nice to have a platform where we aren’t drowned by photo requests all the time,” Taris shared. Now, everyone can find images independently, making work smoother and quicker for everyone involved.
• Instant mobile access speeds up sharing. With PhotoShelter’s app, FileFlow, teams get photos instantly on their phones, even during games. Taris explains, “We send photos via FTP during games, and everyone—from social media to designers—can instantly grab them. It’s nice not having to drop a card or rely on card readers.”

“If you’re looking for something, you can search for that thing on PhotoShelter to find what you need. For example, our fundraising department is always looking for pictures for presentations, mock-ups, and things like that. So it’s really nice to just have a system where, if you ask me to shoot something, you know that you can go find it on PhotoShelter….You can get pretty narrowed down results on PhotoShelter to find exactly what you need, versus us trying to work at games and events while also trying to manage photoshoots and students. So it’s really nice. It takes some of that workload off of us because we do so much of the work on the backend to make the things findable.”

Taris Smith, Staff Photographer, University of Louisville Athletics

PhotoShelter helps the Cardinals stay at the top of their game

Louisville Athletics no longer struggles with messy storage or slow sharing processes. Now, the Cardinals easily access and use their photos, quickly share them during games, and safely protect their important visual history. PhotoShelter has truly become a valuable part of their team’s everyday success.

“PhotoShelter, for us, is like a dictionary for photos… In a dictionary, if you know the first couple of letters of the word you’re looking for, you can go through and find it. Same thing with PhotoShelter.

Taris Smith, Staff Photographer, University of Louisville Athletics