Organizing your photography can be a nightmare. Endless folders and share links. Then trying to find something is a lost cause unless you remember which folder you put it in. Luckily there’s a solution to all of that. Capture Collab was built specifically for churches to be able to store, organize and share their photos and video easily. The best part, you’ll never need a share link again.
In Capture Collab we have several tagging structures.
- Collections
- Photo Shoots
- Locations
- People
- Tags
Collections are a bucket of photos. We often encourage people to invite their key staff and team to a library.
Photo Shoots just represent the date or event that you uploaded the photos. It’s best not to use Albums for more than that. It’s tempting to use them like you would use a Folder but remember, there’s a reason that you are frustrated with your current set up. Use Albums as an event marker like “Sunday Morning Service 2023-01-01”.
Locations are for venues. We suggest using these like you would a map location. Main Campus, Main Auditorium. Foyer. Parking Lot.
People are the people in the photos. You don’t need to add everyone but add the people that you know that you want to be searching for later.
Tags are the bread and butter of this system. If you want to find something later, a tag is how you do that.
Now that we have the terminology out of the way, let’s look a the perfect setup for a church.
- We suggest that you set set up a single Collection for each campus and add all photos taken at that campus to that Collection.
- Use location tags, people and generic tags to organize everything.
- Photo Shoots are mainly for when you upload.
- Tags are how you find things. This is different to every other system where you’d put a folder with the photos in it. That way only allows a photo to be in one place. The tag way allows a photo to be in many places.
Examples using this setup.
Sunday Morning
- Within your Campus Collection create a new Photo Shoot with the date such as “Sunday May 1st 2023”
- Add the location the photos were taken or skip it.
- Add the tags for the day such as “Sunday Service”, “Foyer”, “People”, “Baptism”.
Later in life when you need a photo of smiling people in your foyer you just go to the main search page and search “People Foyer Smiling”. That will pull up everything in the system that matches.
Mindset
Think of this system as a living stream of photos and to find things you add filters to narrow the results to exactly what you’d like. That is the best way to approach the system and if you implement this at your church you’ll find you save hours each week when searching for photos to use in your designs.