Tap into your photo archives

Ultimate Shawn Johnson Gallery

One huge advantage newspapers have over all of the competition is the quality of our photographs. So how do we take better advantage of that?

Obviously producing daily or weekly or monthly “best-of” photo galleries makes sense. But here’s another idea: Tap into our vast archives of photos.

Two photo galleries at DesMoinesRegister.com have accounted for more than 4.5 million page views in the past two and a half months. That’s more than 8 percent of all traffic to our sites in that time.

The galleries: Best of Flood Photos and Ultimate Shawn Johnson Gallery.

A couple things made these successful:

• They were popular topics where we had a lot of great photos.
• The galleries included A LOT of photos – more than 200 flood photos and 300 Shawn Johnson photos.
• They were promoted well – and promoted often.

And I would argue we are not yet doing enough to take advantage of this success. There are plenty of areas where we can see similar success. Iowa Hawkeyes and Iowa State Cyclones football comes to mind right away.

In those areas, we have an archive of thousands of photos going back decades. It would take some work to scan them all in, but clearly there would be page views to be found.

This is clearly a lesson learned for us. We will continue to look for ways to use “ultimate” and “best of” photo galleries in the future.