Steel at sea, images on deadline
Smulders designs, builds and installs steel structures from A to Z: foundations for offshore wind farms, high-voltage substations at sea, bridges and architectural buildings. The group counts over 2,500 employees, spread across sites in Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, England and France.
Every project generates photography: fabrication milestones, site progress, completed installations. Those images are not archive filler. Tender teams need them on deadline and customers need them for sign-off. The entire library was managed by a marketing team of three.
Search with project and milestone filters is faster and more effective than our old folder structure. That structure mainly made sense to me, but not to my colleagues.
Britt Weckx, Marketing, SmuldersTen years of photos in a structure one person understood
For more than ten years, every photo lived on a server in a folder structure Britt had devised herself: one folder per project, subfolders per milestone. Only marketing had access. Every other department sent a request whenever it needed an image for a bid, a presentation or a client update.
Sharing externally was a separate step. Getting images to customers meant sending files through a transfer service on top of the internal search. And the hierarchy mainly made sense to the person who built it. For new colleagues on the growing team, the learning curve was steep.
Tender deadlines and approval rounds do not wait for someone to remember which project folder a shot landed in.
Search replaces the folder map in your head
Smulders adopted Clipido as the home for all new photography. A student worker is importing the older archive in the meantime, so ten years of project photos come together in one searchable library with project and milestone filters.
Britt describes the shift simply: type a project name, filter further if needed, and every image is right there. That beats hunting for one specific photo in one specific folder. She says she does not miss the folder structure for a moment.
For her teammates the difference is even bigger. They no longer have to learn the logic behind ten years of folders. They type and they find.
Fewer requests, faster answers
The number of manual image requests is already dropping. And the questions that still come in are solved in a few clicks by sharing a folder through Clipido, instead of diving into the server archive and packaging files.
External sharing sped up too. Customer approvals that once detoured through file-transfer services now move through Clipido links directly. The same controlled set of images, without the packaging and back-and-forth.
The next step is ready and waiting. Once the archive is fully loaded, commercial and tender teams get direct access and retrieval becomes fully self-service.
Branded workspaces and the firewall question
Not every client environment is equally permissive. Smulders ran into a practical blocker when a customer firewall refused Clipido's default .app domain, leaving shared photos unreachable on the client side.
The proposed fix is a custom domain such as media.smulders.com. That gives customers a branded workspace on an address their IT teams are more likely to allow, instead of a generic domain that triggers corporate filters.
Smulders has also set up a Branding Boutique workspace for an external agency. Getting the filter logic right, switching from AND to OR so the intended image set appears, is the kind of fine-tuning that turns a workspace from almost right into genuinely useful.
Configured for today, room to extend tomorrow
The core workflow is in place: new photos in, search out, shared access for the teams and clients who need it. Smulders is not using every advanced setting yet.
Download presets for quality, watermarks, cropping and copyright notices are available but still to be configured. The same goes for tightening workspace branding and download actions as customer sharing scales up.
For Britt, the gain is already clear in the daily rhythm. Less folder archaeology, fewer repeated requests, and a library built for how Smulders actually searches: by project, by milestone, by urgency, not by who remembers the server path.
