As a camp director or owner, you know the photos captured during your camper’s sessions are some of the most treasured memories your campers will make all year. Every camp photo encapsulates the magic of this special time in your camper’s lives – joyous smiles of old friends united in a carefree environment, new friendships, thrilling outdoor adventures, and milestone moments.
But, organizing all your camp’s pictures has historically been a tedious, time-consuming task, as volumes have increased but software lagged. As you’ve probably learned the hard way, without smart technology to aid your efforts, your camp’s photos and videos can become an overwhelming mountain of disorganized content, making it difficult to get the value inherent in this treasure trove of memories. Follow this guide to organize, curate, and preserve your kids’ summer camp photos and videos like a pro.
Centralize Your Collection of Photos with Photo Attribution
To make collecting photos easy, use the AI-powered WaldoCamps platform, a photo and video management app designed and built specifically for camps. It will allow you to invite your camp photographers, counselors, and other full-time staffers, to contribute directly to your camp’s gallery via Waldo’s web, iOS, or Android apps.
This platform will attach photo attribution to each photo uploaded, allowing you to filter and review photos by contributor. This allows you to broaden out who contributes to your gallery without losing control over what is published. This is valuable as it allows for providing valuable feedback to your various photography resources and reviewing their photos with a differing level of scrutiny based on the source. You can set access and whether photos require review before being published by the contributor.
Use Automated Tagging and Sharing
Once your photos are centrally gathered, attributed, reviewed, and published, leveraging automated AI-based face tagging paired up with texting and waldos app notifications-driven sharing features, also offered by platforms like WaldoCamps, will allow you to get a lot more value from your content.
WaldoCamp’s AI automatically detects individual faces in photos. The platform then automatically shares the matched photo with parents in almost real-time. They will receive a fun, friendly text message or app notification whenever Waldo finds a picture of their loved ones. The photos are delivered straight to their mobile phones.
With WaldoCamps, in particular, you can upload a camp-branded photo overlay and Waldo will automatically add it to every photo uploaded.
This AI–powered, mobile delivery to your families will have three important benefits. First, it will reduce the number of frantic calls and emails you get from parents as they disengage from the unhealthy late-night death scroll, searching for their camp in a sea of photos.
Waldo allows them to relax as they know he will alert them when their camper is found. Second, you’ll improve your relationship with your families as they effortlessly receive little hits of joy as their phone lights up with their camper’s photo and bask in the appreciation of having been saved countless hours of searching.
And third, but probably most importantly from a business point of view, this increased engagement in these camp-branded photos on your parent’s phones, with one tap posting to social, will pay huge marketing dividends as their post turn them into inadvertent influencers for your camp.
Use Custom Tagging to Organize Photos for Future Marketing
As we outlined above, AI-based face tagging is a game changer for the overall organization of photos by camper and opens up countless possibilities, beyond the automated distribution to parents, but it doesn’t stop there. Advanced content management platforms, like WaldoCamps, which have been tailored to camps, also have sophisticated custom tagging and search.
This custom tagging is important for finding the best photos for social media, your website, print collateral, and the like, during the offseason. The custom tagging system lets you label individual photos or entire uploads based on activities, events, locations, or other keywords. Once you have set up the tags, you can use AND / OR search to filter and find photos with one or more tags applied to them, e.g. “closing dance”, or “sunshine cabin”.
The face-tagging and custom tagging combine to make creating an amazing, well-balanced slideshow a breeze. With WaldoCamps, as an example, you have a “spotlights” feature that will allow you to ask Waldo for the best two photos of each camper in a particular session, export them, and produce a balanced slideshow featuring your best moments.
Print Cherished Moments for Display
While digital formats enable quick online sharing, there is nothing quite like tangible printed photos for enjoying memories and decking the halls of camp and your camp’s offices with priceless moments. Within your WaldoCamps admin account, you can easily order prints.
Parents can also easily order prints of their favorite photos directly from the mobile apps as well as the parent-facing web app, accessible via desktop or mobile. You can make your camp’s branded overlay permanent or allow parents to optionally remove it when ordering prints. Your choice.
From the WaldoCamp app, parents can also create personalized campergrams directly from the app itself and send them to their camper. The campergrams allow for including a favorite photo, whether taken live, pulled from their camera roll, or selected from the matched photos delivered from camp.
Campers love to receive a camp photo along with their note from Mom and Dad! Waldo delivers these campergrams to camp via USPS or, as a camp, you can alternatively choose to print these campergrams on-site and deliver them the same day. Campergrams also carry your camp’s branding and make great keepsakes for campers to take home on their last day.
WaldoCamps also allows camp administrators to use Waldograms for Business in order to easily send photo cards throughout the year to campers and their families on birthdays and holidays. It is a great way for camps to stay top of mind and surface amazing memories as decisions around re-enrollment are being made in the offseason.
Compile Memories Over Many Years with Cloud Storage
The WaldoCamps Photo Manager subscription for camps comes with 1 TB of storage, allowing you to keep years of archives on the platform. Additional storage can be purchased for a small fee for archives. Being cloud-based, you can access your camp’s images easily on the web, iOS, and Android, from anywhere with an internet connection. And being in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about accidentally losing this valuable content asset you have invested in.
WaldoCamp makes it possible to deepen your relationship with your families through your content while getting a lot more marketing value from it.
Remove the tedious work from the photo management process with AI-powered tagging, sharing, and printing. Campers, parents, and staff will be thrilled to easily find, view, and share photos highlighting meaningful memories made throughout the summer. Level up your content strategy this next season with WaldoCamps.
