Spring Cleaning Your Project Photography Files
Spring may be winding down, but there is still time to knock out items on your spring cleaning list. As an AEC marketer, a clean-up and audit of your project photos is a perfect task to undertake when you have a break in deadlines. Project photography is one of the strongest tools we can leverage to market and sell our work. So, is your product in good working order to highlight your firm’s expertise? Or are your project photos a bit of a hodge podge, stored all over the place and difficult to find for project pursuits?? A project photography audit may be in order! This may seem like a daunting task; below are some steps and tips to get you started:
1. File structure. It may seem like a no-brainer, but in the frequent scramble to finish a proposal, project photos can end up being located in various places. Create a folder structure that houses all of the marketing-use photos for each project, from early sketches and renderings to final professional photography. Don’t allow some of it to live in active project folders, construction progress folders, etc. Make your own copies for marketing and move it all into one easy-to-find spot.
2. Naming system. Develop a file naming system to make it easy to identify the photos by type or project stage. Leaving photos named with project numbers can be confusing and make it difficult to identify what the photo is illustrating.. Take the time to plan out the naming convention before you get started. We recommend naming each photo first with the name of the project, then use an extension such as a “-” or “_” (dash or underscore) to identify the type of photo. For example, if you work at an architecture firm, you photo type identifiers could be something like:
-Project Name - Render01
-Project Name - Construction01
-Project Name - Exterior01
If you work at a construction company, you likely will need to dedicate more names to progress photos to fully document the construction process. And engineering firms may need more technical names that show the detail of the project’s engineering systems.
3. Photo sizing. Determine what you are going to be using your photos for. Will it be only small format, such as brochures and proposals? Or do you need high resolution, large format for project site signs and banners at trade shows? Take a look at what sizes your current photos are and if they meet your needs. As you are organizing and renaming your photo assets, it may be necessary to create a filing system to separate file sizes so you can easily find the size you need. You don’t want to slow down a proposal file with large photos and it can be frustrating to need a high resolution photo and only have small sizes available that become blurry when you drop them into a large format document. This exercise can also inform the sizes and types of final photography you ask professional photographers to deliver to you in the future. We suggest asking photographers for both the original high resolution images and smaller jpegs, ready to be used in most marketing efforts.
4. Identify gaps. As you are organizing your firm’s photography assets, you may realize that you have fewer photos of certain projects than you thought. Make a list of projects that you’d like to gather more visuals for (whether early renderings or updated final photography), and come up with a plan to fill these gaps. You may also realize that you need to schedule professional photography soon for some of your new projects.
Ultimately, our goal as marketers is to help our firms win work and our past projects are some of the best opportunities to showcase expertise. The effort to improve your photography file system is well worth it as you strategize how to win that next project.
Overwhelmed by the thought of spring cleaning your own project photo files? That’s where we come in; we’d love to help you tackle a photography audit and have done just that for other clients. Reach out here and we can get started!