We found our solution for storing and searching for our agency's photos

The Inter-American Foundation is an independent U.S. government agency that promotes community-led development in Latin America and the Caribbean. We use photos and videos in our blogs and social media, in reports to Congress, and in our own communications products such as our annual report. At the IAF, we use Canto to compile, store, access, and share photos for our agency. We were looking for a system that could accommodate all of our photos, ideally in cloud-based storage that would be accessible from anywhere. It was very important to us to be able to attach metadata, including keywords, tags, descriptions, and custom fields, to each photo. It was also essential to us to be able to search by country, by grantee, by individual picture, and by topic area. We may need to find a photo of an artisanal fishery project, or of women in sustainable agriculture, or of a specific grantee from Honduras, and we needed a system that would make it easy to do that. Nice-to-haves included having a way for contractors, photographers, or foundation representatives to upload photos and videos, as well as having a way to share specific sets of photos with external people without having to share our entire photo catalog with them.