University of Alaska Fairbanks Now Centralizes Campus Communications with PhotoShelter

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has invested in PhotoShelter to serve as its digital asset management system — a single source for organizing, managing, and distributing its brand content.

With seven campuses across the state, UAF is home to more than 7,400 students from all over the world. The university is renowned for its Arctic research, Alaska Native and Indigenous programs, entrepreneurship, workforce development, and hands-on, personalized learning.

Adam Rubin joined the UAF team as creative director in early 2023 and joined the ongoing conversation about the need for a centralized system to address the university’s digital challenges.

At the time, there were nine different Smugmug accounts across campus, random Google drives, and nearly 20 external hard drives with years’ worth of photos piling up. Content was outdated, difficult to sift through, and lacked the self-service setup necessary for their team to succeed.

With simple tagging tools and searchability available right out of the box, PhotoShelter was the perfect solution for UAF.

“Knowing that PhotoShelter is used by multiple major schools, but also pro sports teams, we knew it could handle the volume and was vetted by folks whose job it is to deliver media,” Adam told us. “That immediately set it to the top of our list. And then we went through the demo and realized, yes, this works for all of our photo needs and can facilitate the video that we have, too.”

KELSEY WALLACE DANCES WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS’ INU-YUPIAK DANCE GROUP DURING THE 2014 FESTIVAL OF NATIVE ARTS.

PhotoShelter is already helping to streamline many of the UAF team’s creative workflows. As a university, model releases are an essential part of the content approval process. Properly identifying the people who appear in their imagery is a must, and PhotoShelter’s AI tagging has assisted in making that process easier.

“Leaning into PhotoShelter AI and utilizing the automated systems is the only way we’re ever gonna stay above water. Any photo request would typically take one photographer 2 to 4 hours to facilitate, and then you expand that — that’s more than an entire year’s worth of work saved from his plate so that he can continue to go out and capture new content, rather than constantly recycling old content.”

Adam Rubin, Creative Director at University of Alaska Fairbanks

“As our community of education clients continues to grow, we are very excited to empower the team at University of Alaska Fairbanks with a centralized solution for all of their content creation and distribution needs,” said PhotoShelter CEO Andrew Fingerman. “We look forward to growing with this team and seeing how they use PhotoShelter’s artificial intelligence tools to streamline their visual content workflow.”

PhotoShelter is the fastest, easiest, and most intuitive way to manage and automate your end-to-end content workflow to drive your brand engagement, get better ROI from content, and improve efficiency across your team. That’s why thousands of organizations and enterprises globally trust PhotoShelter with their success.