“Pictures or It Didn’t Happen”
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
You already know the value of taking pictures. We all photograph our children growing up, we take the camera with us on vacation, and snap pics when it snows in Texas. We take pictures of our favorite moments and things. Doing so at work is just as important.
In the early days when I was the only one here with a digital camera, I attended softball games, movie nights, family day and everything in between. After a while, people started calling me a few times a week: “Jason, hurry! You have to get a picture of this wig Greg is wearing before he takes it off!” “Can you get a picture of the team leads delivering breakfast?” “Pam accidentally mismatched her shoes. Come get a picture!” Nowadays just about everyone has a camera. Either a small pocket one or on their phone. Quite a few people have invested in a nice digital SLR. Now everyone is a photographer and we’re all contributing to the “Beryl Archives.”
The “Beryl Archives” is simply a folder on our network, like any department folder, that holds all of our photos – organized first by year, then by event or thing. It’s our central source for every kind of photo. We publish several to our online Google Picasa Album and put a private link on our intranet for people to access. And we installed a free version of Picasa, which has facial recognition technology, on some desktops. So if we’re celebrating Brenda’s birthday and need photos of her, we can find several dozen in only a few seconds.
As of right now, we have 38,403 photos in 744 folders on our shared network. This represents every digital photo we’ve taken since 2002. I also have a large box of another thousand or so printed photos from the 90′s, which was before I started working here, and before the digital camera revolution.
In addition to posting them on our intranet, or using them to recognize an employee, we can reference last years photos to promote this years events. We can put them into a slide show for the holiday party, post to Facebook, include in presentations and our bi-monthly employee newsletter, and ultimately take the best ones, print, frame and hang them on the wall for posterity. Some of our events we create photo books online and take them to trade shows.
Here is a sampling of photo categories from the Archives over the years:
- New Hire Class and Training
- Chili Cook Off
- Crazed Fan Day
- 25th Anniversary Kickoff
- Halloween
- Snow!
- Mardi Gras
- Team Lead Pie Face
- Brand Kickoff
- Bob’s Male Modeling Photos
So, we definitely have a variety. New employees and tenured ones can browse nearly a decades worth of photos and see how our traditions got their start, what the conference rooms used to look like, and who used to have hair. It’s a wealth of history. Little time capsules. Internal marketing tools. Employee recognition. And it’s totally free.
A few questions to ask yourself:
- Are you taking pictures of special moments at your company?
- Do you encourage your staff to contribute photos?
- Where do you keep your photos? Are they split up between each “photographer” on their home computers?
- How can you use the photos other than a simple photo album?
farrukh pervaiz
This is really cool………….. so many pictures…