Your School Has Thousands of Photos and Videos… Can You Find Them?
Summer is a valuable season in school marketing. When the pace slows, you have a brief period to organize and establish systems for the next school year. One high-value project that’s top of mind right now is organizing schools’ photo and video libraries.
Every independent school sits on a treasure trove of visual assets, whether they realize it or not. Years of photography, videos, event coverage, classroom moments, and student stories are often scattered across hard drives, Google Drives, personal laptops, cell phones, and forgotten folders. When it's time to update the website, design a viewbook, create social media content, or launch an enrollment campaign, it’s a huge challenge to find what you need.
We’ve spent time with one school who is the media archive gold standard. Forsyth Country Day School in Winston-Salem, NC has their photo archive (dating back 20+ years) organized both by event and by person. Think about that. They have a folder for every student who’s been photographed going back decades. Whenever an alum has a birthday, the advancement office sends a well-wishes text with a photo from their time as a student. If you ask the school for all photos of Jane Doe ’07, they can share the folder in seconds. The uses of the photo archive go on and on.
While it may not be practical to go “full Forsyth” on your archive, we do want to share four ways to better use your visual assets heading into next school year.
1. Consolidate Everything Into One Location
First things first, know where your assets live and organize them in one place. Gather photos and videos from current team members, former employees, yearbook archives, photographers, and shared drives. The goal is centralization.
From there, place all photos in one cloud-based location. Whether you use Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or a dedicated digital asset management platform, your team should know exactly where to go when they need photos or video.
2. Create a Folder Structure Future Employees Can Understand
Many schools organize files by year and date alone.
2025-26 Photos → October
The problem with that method is that future team members can struggle to find what they need. Whenever you can, organize and categorize with as much detail as possible. It’s fine to start with the academic year, but drill down further from there. For instance
2025-26 Photos → Upper School → Athletics → Homecoming → Dance
Design everything so that when a new staffer joins your team, nothing requires explanation or institutional knowledge.
3. Build a "Selects" Folder
It's a reality that not every photo is a visual all-star. For website, framing, publication, and social media purposes, it’s helpful to have a curated folder containing your strongest images. Only a handful of images from an event or photoshoot may make it to the “Selects” folder.
The next time you're looking for a cover image for the school magazine or a new photo to have framed for an office, you’ll know where to look.
4. Identify the Gaps in Your Assets and Plan Ahead to Fill Them
As you sort through your assets, ask yourself what stories are missing. If you work at a K-12 school, it’s often easy to take great photos in the lower school. It becomes progressively hard to capture beautiful images of 7th grade boys and by the time they’re in high school, students are often over having their photos taken at all.
Beyond that, if you structure your photography and videography strategy around event coverage, you can inadvertently create gaps. You may have hundreds of photos from athletic events and graduation ceremonies, but fewer compelling images of classroom learning. Others have beautiful campus photography but lack authentic student-teacher interactions.
As you identify those gaps, plan ahead for this coming year. Think less about event coverage and more about filling your archive with the most useful and engaging visual assets. Intentionality as you plan now prevents headaches later and ensures that your school always has the images and videos needed to tell its story.
In Conclusion…
Your school's photos and videos are more than marketing assets. They are a visual record of your mission, culture, and community. Take the time to organize them. If you happen to have an intern, it’s a perfect task for them to start and execute with proper guidance.
If you’ve seen smart and useful ways to organize visual assets, we’d love to hear about it! Drop us an email to info@38house.com.
