Is Your Brand’s Visual History At Risk?
A Digital Photography Wake‑Up Call
Poor file management can lead to serious difficulties - are your brand’s digital images futureproof?
A recent article in Digital Camera World highlighted the issue of treasured family photos becoming inaccessible as time and technology march onwards. Hard drives can fail, image formats go obsolete, cloud services can shut down at short notice. Our precious images might be easily retrievable one day and lost forever the next.
Obviously, family photos and commercial images are very different, but the value of a company’s visual history shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Every year, businesses generate thousands of photos. New product launches, high-level employee appointments, award ceremonies, staff events, and dozens of other milestones all get recorded, whether formally or informally.
As a brand grows its history becomes ever more important. But, without due care, those legacy images can disappear.
So how do you safeguard this valuable corporate resource?
The Double-Edged Sword of Digital
Digital photography has brought many benefits, but it’s dragged a few significant drawbacks along with it, too. The ease and immediacy of taking photos these days means it’s hard to regard them with the same kind of value that came almost automatically with film photographs. So there’s a tendency for people to treat digital images as more temporary and disposable, and not put the same effort into keeping them safe. Businesses in particular need to guard against the potential consequences of losing their visual legacy.
Why Businesses Are at Higher Risk
Compared to a family, where responsibility for taking and then looking after photos and videos typically falls to one or two individuals, a business can receive images from dozens of different sources. Employees might capture shots on their personal or work mobiles, while more professional images can be created by in-house teams or external freelancers. The responsibility for different types of imagery may fall to different departments - HR for headshots and business portraits, R&D for prototypes and test setups, marketing for product images - further complicating the situation.
Once the photos have been received, and any immediate need for them has been fulfilled, they tend to run into the following issues:
Short-term thinking: Corporate photos are often a response to an immediate need — a product launch, an article in a trade publication that needs a shot of the CEO — and once that need is met the tendency is to move onto the next task as quickly as possible. It’s difficult to stop and think about how useful that photograph might prove to be in 5, 10, or even 25 years’ time.
Lack of centralised storage: Often, companies have no official policy in place for image archiving. Photos can end up stored locally on employees’ laptops, on a shared drive in whatever location makes the most sense at the time, or even just on an unlabelled USB stick destined for the back of a random drawer.
Inconsistent approach to naming and metadata: Unless instructed otherwise, most photographers will send photos bearing the filename allocated by the camera, or perhaps the company name followed by a sequential number. If left like that, tracking down a specific shot a few years later could be virtually impossible.
Staff turnover: When an employee leaves, a company can lose access to archived photos if they’re password protected. Most company servers become pretty labyrinthine over time, so perhaps the loss will be restricted merely to their location, or even their very existence. Relying on somebody stumbling across them at a later date is not a workable strategy!
Low perceived value: Corporate images lack the sentimental value of family photos, so their worth isn’t always as easy to appreciate. That snap of the company founder holding the first working prototype may have seemed like a throwaway image at the time, but by the time the ten-millionth unit rolls off the production line it has become an invaluable part of the company’s history. If only somebody knew where it was…
Celebrating the opening of the Coventry branch of this pet store chain - the first of many as the brand grows across the Midlands and beyond
A company photo for a Leamington company celebrating the brand’s 80th anniversary
Developing A Resilient Approach to Company Photo Archives
1. Implement a Photo Governance Policy
Be clear who has responsibility for photo archives. It might be a designated Archivist or a team with shared responsibility, but any employee with an image that needs to be filed should know who to contact.
Define how images should be named, tagged, and stored for efficient retrieval in the future. A photo kept under >Shared Drive > Company > Marketing > Susan > Susan’s Pics > New Folder (2) > DSC_1234.jpg is no use to anybody.
Specify storage requirements: define an appropriate backup frequency, and be clear about the required retention time.
2. Use Durable Formats & Storage Media
RAW files, if supplied, may be worth holding on to, but they are niche formats and may not always be accessible. Ensure every image has a master file in an open, documented format (such as TIFF or JPEG) at the highest practical resolution, to help ensure they can be accessed in the future.
Multiple copies of important photos should always be kept in different places: for instance, a local server, cloud backup, off‑site digital vault, or archival drive. Again, it should be clearly defined who has responsibility for maintaining the backup.
3. Regular Audits & Migration
Carry out annual audits to confirm backup integrity and access. This helps to ensure any issues can be identified and address as early as possible.
Proactively Migrate photos away from older image formats or storage media. Don’t risk not being able to open an image file because a format is no longer supported, or finding that even the oldest computer in the office can’t access the physical media any more (CD-ROM, anyone?).
4. Encourage Retrieval & Legacy Use
Curate images into digital albums or galleries for easy access, and make sure anyone who needs the images knows where and how to find them.
Encourage teams to reuse archival photos in newsletters, celebrate anniversaries and other milestones with images to help foster an appreciation of the company’s history and evolution.
Print or exhibit selected images - printed pictures always carry more impact than ones simply viewed on a screen, so find some wall space and get those photos on display! Refresh the prints regularly to keep the displays interesting and engaging.
Business portrait of the CEO of a Warwick-based telecoms company
A running event where the keynote speaker was a high-level coach from the USA visiting the UK for the first time.
Think Ahead Now, Look Back Later
There’s a very strong chance businesses that don’t take action now will find themselves struggling to fill a gap in their visual history in the near future. Corporate memory isn’t just useful PR; it’s a vital part of a company’s identity, a demonstration of a brand’s continuity and credibility. No business should risk losing these important and often irreplaceable assets.
Storytelling is acknowledged as a phenomenally powerful tool in marketing, but it needs to be built on a credible foundation. A retrospective celebrating how a company has grown over the last ten years rings rather hollow without some visual proof of its humble beginnings. A social media post showing a product’s evolution through 10 years of development means nothing if there aren’t any pictures of the early editions.
Take a lesson from how we should all be looking after our own personal photos, and treat corporate photography with the care it deserves.
[And, of course, all the above applies to video files, too!]
Finally, Make Sure Your Images are Worth Preserving!
If you’d like to talk about how a professional photographer can help your business with images that are worth hanging onto, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
