The Big 12 Conference has partnered with PhotoShelter’s digital asset management business unit, Libris, to help meet the challenges they faced in efficiently organizing and sharing their 70,000 plus photos.
Over twenty years, the Big 12 have accumulated thousands of photos of student-athletes, coaches, events and championships. Having so many photos on their hard drive has made it difficult to push out time sensitive photos to their websites and social media pages. By partnering with Libris, the Big 12 now has a way to organize their photos and quickly access them to post whenever needed.
Up until this partnership, the Big 12 would have to organize the photos on their server. Having acculturated so many photos from the past, and adding more each season, they were taking up a lot of space on their servers.
According to Rob Carolla, Director of Communications at Big 12 Conference, “We have a good number of the photos saved on our server here internally, which is obviously eating up a lot of space… But where it really became a challenge was where we had our conference championship… our photographers would send us photos for use on our social media and website but trying to share those photos with our member schools was becoming more challenging. We would have to wait for the photographer to send us the photos on CD or DVD and then we would have to in turn get them back out to the schools.”
In this day and age of technology, it seems that speed is a huge importance to fans. It is important to be able to share up-to-date photos as quickly as possible.
Now, with Libris, the Big 12 will be able to log onto a cloud-based system to access these photos in a time-efficient and organized way. Every photo will be tagged and therefore easy to search.
“I could type in the student athlete’s name, Abby Smith, and it would give me every picture of Abby Smith that we have in our system. That’s really helpful,” said Carolla.
Another way that Libris cuts down time is by eliminating the middleman from photographer to one of the Big 12’s ten member schools. When photographers go to events, games, or championships, they will be given a username and password to log onto Libris and upload and tag the photos themselves.
Once the photos are on the system, the member schools will be able to log onto the system, easily type in what photo they are looking for and be able to pull it up and share it quickly.
Carolla has talked to photographers that are familiar with the system, and they all spoke positively about it.
“They vouched very highly of it. When you have actual photographers that vouch for it… that speaks volumes.”
The Big 12 will begin using the system this season, and will be able ensure that they can meet the immediate demands of fans, colleges and reporters.
This post by Brittany Patko was originally published in SportTechie. Cover photo by Scott D. Weaver for the Big 12 Conference.
