A house for the people, six to seven days a week
De Roma is a cultural house in Borgerhout, Antwerp: concerts across every genre, film screenings, debate nights, circus and neighbourhood activities, six to seven days a week. A small professional team supports a much larger volunteer operation that keeps the hall running night after night.
Almost every activity has a photographer or videographer in the building. That archive is not storage but working material: aftershow mailings with last night's photos, social posts, press images and print work, from magazine covers to photo reports.
As a test I typed 'volunteers with funny hats'. The first five photos were exactly that: De Roma people with the craziest things on their heads. That search function is worth a lot to us.
Jef Vandermosten, Communications & Marketing, De RomaWhich folder has that beer at the entrance desk?
Before Clipido, every image arrived as a download link from the photographer, usually WeTransfer, and disappeared into SharePoint folders per date and per season. High-res and low-res versions were kept separately, with no single source of truth. Search only worked on date, season, photographer or event name.
Anyone looking for a thematic image, say someone holding a beer at the entrance desk, had to guess which concert most likely produced that photo and start scrolling there. Previews loaded slowly, big folders opened even slower, so everyone ended up at Jef's desk, because only he knew where to look.
The workaround made it worse. To find theme photos back later, Jef manually copied images into extra folders, such as one per season for volunteer photos. That selection was never complete, because it depended on his attention in the moment. Jonathan, responsible for digital strategy, watched the system grow heavier every season.
From WeTransfer links to one platform
The switch started with a Pukkelpop post about Clipido, passed along by colleagues. De Roma moved to one platform for uploading, tagging, searching, downloading and sharing. For Jonathan, that replaced a fragmented SharePoint setup with a single environment the organisation can build on.
Photographers now upload straight into their own upload workspace. Tagging templates make sure their images arrive with the right context from the start, ready to use, without anyone processing download links anymore.
The duplicate high-res and low-res problem disappeared: there is one canonical file per image, surfaced wherever it is needed through search. Instead of a rigid folder hierarchy, the team searches by what is actually in the photo.
The test: volunteers with funny hats
Jef wanted to know what search could handle and typed 'volunteers with funny hats'. The first five results were exactly that: colleagues and volunteers with the craziest things on their heads. Images nobody could have placed in a folder anymore appeared on screen in seconds.
Face recognition solved a task that was never truly finished before. When a volunteer or colleague says goodbye, the team wants all the good photos of that person. That used to mean digging through incomplete collection folders. Now every person is as searchable as a keyword.
And when a search does not land exactly right, Similar search steps in. One click on a photo that comes close, and the system shows visually related alternatives. It closes the gap between what someone remembers and what they typed.
Search it yourself, share it yourself
Photo requests no longer pile up with one person. The communications team searches for itself, the in-house designer picks images for print, and after volunteer parties and outings an album link simply goes out to the volunteers.
External sharing runs through the same library: press images and partner selections leave as share links instead of loose files. Meanwhile Jonathan is testing logo overlays and download actions, such as an automatic reminder to credit the photographer on copyrighted images.
Asked what would happen if Clipido disappeared, both give the same answer: they would have to go back to the old way of working, and that is a real problem. By now the wins are baked into how De Roma runs day to day.
Making search the new reflex
Not everyone adjusted immediately. Colleagues who do not work with media every day missed the familiar folder structure: it feels safe, even though it stopped working at scale long ago. Someone who needs photos of concert X looks for a folder first, not a search bar.
De Roma is tackling that with a short presentation at the start of the new season: this is how we upload, this is how we tag, and this is how you search for yourself. The goal is to make search as natural as opening a folder once was.
For a house that runs on volunteers, that matters. The archive should not depend on who happens to know where things live. It has to work for anyone who needs the right image on a busy show night.
