PhotoShelter for Brands

Using Libris as our digital asset management system has been a time saver. We are able to upload and share photos in light boxes to clients. We have control over what can be seen and what is archived. Our "best of" photos can be rated with a star. Photos can be tagged so that they are easy to find. This means that the Widener community can go on and easily find the photos that they need.

First and foremost I have to say the customer service Photoshelter provides for Libris users is absolutely wonderful. Their team gets back to you quickly with answers to your questions and is always pleasant to work with.

Libris truly shines in it's ability to easily organize and then later search for the images you need. You have the ability to set up the folder structure in any way that fits your needs (which is not something I say about the last product we were using) and the backend structure is so user friendly, it's a breeze to move collections, galleries, or even individual photos around after upload. All you need to do is grab them and drag and drop them into a different area.

On the search side of things, you have great control over the types of parameters you can give the search. Everything from searching for photos based on a specific orientation, to things photographed on certain dates...it's quite nice and the results are fast and (seemingly) very accurate.

Uploading is fast, and has a number of potential ways it can be integrated into your workflow, including a lightroom plugin.

As much as we like Libris overall, it is not without it's limitations and there are a couple of big ones we hope are eventually addressed.

The biggest one for us at the moment is Libris' inability to allow downloads without either a password or a user login. This is a bummer and is currently a bit clunky. We produce content for a wide range of people and we would like to make that content available for download to everyone, but the best you can do right now is put a password on everything and then try and make that password available to the public, which is just clunky and a bit odd. We really hope they implement a password and login free option soon.

Secondly, when you search for images there is no way to sort what we have searched for in the results page. Want to search for something and then sort by "date taken" or "date uploaded"? Not possible. The other slightly frustrating thing is there is no way to change the size of the image thumbnails in the galleries or search results. They are a bit small and it can sometimes be hard to see what the photo looks like until you click on it to make it larger.

Really there are so many things to like about Libris that I wouldn't say the above should be deal breakers, but they are things I think could really help improve it.

Libris hosts our photo library. Overall the experience using it has been incredibly frustrating. I feel like I waste an incredible amount of time trying to find images that should be easy to access. Would not recommend this product.

Part of Chick-fil-A's mission statement includes “being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us”. Repurposing photos is a great way to keep your budgets under control.