Nerdland Festival keeps festival photos organized at scale

From podcast to 30,000 visitors

Working Class Heroes is a management, booking and production company for comedians and creators. Lieven Scheire, Wouter Deprez, Jens Dendoncker and Xander De Rycke are among the names on the roster, alongside podcasts such as Welcome To The AA, de volksjury and Nerdland.

That last podcast grew into Nerdland Festival: a major science festival with famous guests, exhibitors and tens of thousands of visitors. Lana Deldycke, Promotions Manager at Working Class Heroes, oversees communications relating to live shows, events and merchandise, and works with the promotions team to help drive sales.

Dropbox links, double uploads and no way to search

Before Clipido, the photo and video crew sent Dropbox links after each show or festival day. The promo team downloaded everything and uploaded it again to their own Dropbox. Over time that became an archive nobody could search and a maze of folders by year, event and whoever created them last.

However, with three new team members joining and a festival for 30,000 visitors in the pipeline, that model was no longer scalable. For Nerdland Festival, this meant someone had to manually go through all the photos in Dropbox and organise them into more or less logical folders. It also meant that selected photos of speakers and guests could only be shared much too late, by which point the moment had already passed.

Upload forms, tags and search that anyone can use

Clipido became the primary photo database, especially for festivals where face recognition and AI search matter most. Upload forms and tagging templates decide how assets land before anyone can argue about folder names. Location, date and show context go on once, and stay consistent.

Lana describes the core gain as overview, usability and search. Describe the photo you have in mind and nine times out of ten it surfaces. Colour codes help distinguish AI results from manually tagged material, and once the logic clicks, the team moves fast.

The whole office has access. For Nerdland, one shared folder saw twenty-seven members during the festival, from promo and marketing to the photo and video crew. A one-page guide Lana wrote beforehand was enough. Nobody came back saying they could not find what they needed.

Photographers upload live from the field

The shift accelerated with Clipido workspaces. Before the festival, Lana collected the photographers' email addresses, gave them access and a short how-to. From then on they uploaded directly from the grounds instead of sending links for someone else to re-upload and sort.

Photographers could add day and photographer tags; the promo team handled the rest. That was a fraction of the manual work Dropbox required on every festival day. Lana had expected that the volume of photo material and the speed at which files were being uploaded and downloaded might affect Clipido's performance, but the platform never missed a beat and proved extremely reliable.

Guest photos within an hour, partners self-serving

Face recognition changed how fast guest photos could leave the building. Select the right faces, drop images into a folder and share within an hour of a show, while guests are still posting and the brand moment is live. The year before, that same workflow was manual, slow and incomplete.

Exhibitors, speakers and stand holders receive a Clipido link by email over the weekend. Face recognition lets them find themselves without filing complaints about missing booth shots. Search by stand name or visual similarity replaced digging through thousands of files.

The same library all year

Nerdland Festival is the intensive use case, but Working Class Heroes keeps Clipido running year-round. Updating the website with fresh photos used to take close to a day of searching. Now it is a query and done. Partner dossiers, press material and artist assets pull from the same searchable library.

The team is extending Clipido to more artist work beyond the festival context, for the same reason: everything is easier to find, tag and share without a designated archive keeper.

Ask Lana for one word and she does not hesitate: lifesaver.