WesternU Gives Every Photo and Video A Future With PhotoShelter

WesternU needed a better way to manage its growing visual library

For more than 45 years, Western University of Health Sciences (WesternU) has prepared students for careers across health care and medicine. They are an independent nonprofit health professions university with campuses in Pomona, California, and Lebanon, Oregon.

As WesternU produced more content, the creative team needed one place to protect those assets, manage large video files, and make approved materials available across the university.

The challenge: WesternU’s best footage couldn’t move beyond one project

Debra Nelson, Graphic Design Manager, Jeff Malet, Multimedia Manager, and Steven Webber, Video Producer and Photographer, create and manage the visual content used across WesternU.

The university’s storage systems made it difficult to preserve that work and continue getting value. Video was an especially costly problem as the team’s library of high-quality footage grew.

• Assets were everywhere and hard to find and use. Before PhotoShelter, WesternU’s team relied on Canto Cumulus, mirrored hard drives, internal servers, and local storage. “You had to know who the photographer was,” Debra said. “A lot of things lived on local hard drives, and that may be the only copy of the asset, which is a problem when somebody would leave.”
• IT-owned storage created access and capacity issues. The internal server system created friction because IT owned the servers, but the creative and multimedia teams were the ones filling them with large photo and video files.
• Video was hard to search and harder to use. Steven’s team creates and stores large amounts of video and B-roll. Without a searchable, accessible library, useful clips risked being used once and forgotten instead of reused across future projects. “Maybe I shot this video six months ago, but that footage could be useful for this shoot over here,” explained Steven.
• Raw video files were too large for everyday users. WesternU still needed a separate storage process for massive raw footage, especially from high-end shoots. But the team also needed a more accessible version of the content that people could preview and use without downloading large files.
• The MarCom team was constantly fielding asset requests. Because employees across the university did not have easy access to the assets they needed, Jeff, Debra, and the team were frequently pulled into requests for photos, logos, templates, and other files.

“Myself and at least the graphic design folks would get constant email requests for assets, photography, logos, templates, whatever. We would always respond, trying to get those for them.”

Multimedia Manager, Western University of Health Sciences

The solution: PhotoShelter puts past footage back to work

PhotoShelter gives WesternU a better way to preserve its visual content and make it available for new projects, audiences, and employees.

• PhotoShelter gives WesternU one central brand hub. The team can share logos, templates, and branded photos and videos from a single place. As Debra put it, “Instead of emailing me or emailing my team for logos, graphics, PowerPoint templates, or whatever else, we can put it all in PhotoShelter and send them a link if they need it. Or they know PhotoShelter is there and they can find it.”
• Metadata and AI Visual Search help the team find specific moments within video. Metadata connects clips to relevant topics and events. “When you upload footage into a gallery in PhotoShelter, you can select all the files afterward and apply metadata tags in bulk. So even if the footage wasn’t originally named for that event, it will still be connected to it through the metadata,” Steve explained. AI Visual Search also helps uncover images and footage based on its visual content. Steven said, “I typed in a helicopter or bird, and it pulled up shots that had a bird or an airplane in it. It knows.”

• A shared B-roll library makes footage practical to preview and reuse. “The biggest thing for me is building a B-roll library where all these shots we’ve captured, or are going to capture, can be used as much as possible and don’t just die with one video.” Steven converts massive raw files into compressed MP4 clips in PhotoShelter’s video digital asset management platform, so teammates can watch and download without handling the originals. Debra explained how helpful this is for her team, “That saves me extra steps of downloading and taking it into a different program to clip it. Very useful.”
• Workspaces help campaign teams collect, share, and approve assets. The team uses Workspaces for advertising, social media, enrollment email, brochures, magazines, and internal reviews. “We have a marketing assets folder where these people have signed release forms. The people you see in these images are able to be used in paid media,” explained Steven. Workspaces help gather assets in a presentable, shareable place where stakeholders can quickly approve or reject images.

• Single sign-on makes university-wide access manageable. WesternU’s MarCom team supports colleges across health sciences, including dental medicine, veterinary medicine, and others. They now use single sign-on so more than 1,000 employees can access PhotoShelter with their university credentials. Employees can find approved assets themselves, while public folders give media contacts direct access to frequently requested materials.
• Public and private access help the team share the right assets with the right audience. WesternU uses public folders for media requests and locked-down folders for internal or sensitive content. That gives the team the flexibility to share campus photos, logos, and media kit assets externally while keeping other assets restricted. “It is very useful to have both a public access folder that anybody can get in and a very private access, and then even levels within the private access. We have to be very careful about privacy laws, and it is nice to be able to have different levels of access.”

“We have a folder we call the media kit that is public access, not behind our single sign-on. If we have requests from external sources, like a newspaper or a magazine, we can give them the link to those public folders and they can download a campus shot, our president, or our logo.”

Graphic Design Manager, Western University of Health Sciences

PhotoShelter turns WesternU’s content into a university-wide resource

WesternU’s visual library now supports the people creating content and those putting it to use. The creative team can spend more time producing new work while employees and external partners access the materials prepared for them.

“PhotoShelter made life much easier for all of us. It allows us to focus more on what we do instead of trying to find assets for everybody or track things down.”

Multimedia Manager, Western University of Health Sciences