Beeldbank.nl Helps Dutch Teams Design a Beeldbank Structure Around Five to Eight Questions

Designing the structure of a new image bank around what seems logical often leaves colleagues unable to find anything. A better start is listening, and Beeldbank.nl, the Dutch beeldbank, is built around that idea. Beeldbank.nl advises starting an image bank by writing down the five to eight questions colleagues ask most often and turning each into a field or filter. This article shows how to do that, and how the questions lead to fields, filters and menu pages for a Dutch team.

Start the Image Bank Structure with the Questions Colleagues Actually Ask

Imagine a team of five who are starting from scratch. Before anyone creates a single folder, each person writes down the questions they ask when they need an image, and the questions colleagues ask them. A communication team might collect things like "Do we have images of our headquarters?", "Which photos show outdoor events?" or "Which photos may we use on the website?". Write them down in the words people actually use, not in the words you think they should use. If you are setting this up for a small team, what image management software for SMEs needs helps you judge how much structure you want.

Then count which questions come back most often and keep the top five to eight. Each of those becomes a field or a filter. This turns a vague design discussion into a concrete list, and when colleagues open the image bank, the structure matches how they already think. They see their own words in the filters instead of a framework somebody else invented.

From Colleague Questions to Fields, Filters and Menu Pages

Once you have the list, decide where each question lives. Beeldbank.nl lets organisations work with albums, collections, tags and categories to structure image material their own way, so different teams can follow different priorities. An agency may think in clients and campaigns, a housing association in properties and rooms, and both fit.

You also start with a head start in filters. The default filters in Beeldbank.nl are file type (image, video, presentation, audio or other), size, image orientation (horizontal, vertical or square) and people. A question such as "Do we have a portrait photo for this layout?" is already answered by the orientation filter, and you add fields only for questions that are specific to your team, such as an event, a campaign or a department.

The menu is the third place a question can live. In Beeldbank.nl the menu sits at the top, each item is a page and the menu has at most two levels: pages and sub-pages. Use main pages for the groups your colleagues reach for first, and sub-pages for the next cut. Once the structure is in place, a step-by-step guide for new image bank administrators covers inviting users and setting rights.

Why a Simple Two-Level Menu Keeps the Beeldbank Easy to Navigate

A menu of pages and sub-pages keeps navigation clear. It stops you from rebuilding the folder tree you are trying to leave behind. Instead of endless subfolders that mirror your organisation chart, you rely on filters and search for the deeper cuts. A team with several locations can use a location field rather than a separate page for each office. A seasonal business can use a date or season field rather than folders that quickly go out of date.

When deciding whether a question deserves a menu page, ask whether it is a navigation question or a search question. Navigation questions deserve a page. A search question fits better as a field that people can filter on. Check this with the people who asked the question: if they would reach for a filter first, the field is the right home for it.

Kickstart Training: Deciding the Beeldbank Menu Structure Together

Customers can set up fields, filters, pages and user rights themselves, and Beeldbank.nl recommends its Kickstart training to start with a good structure. In the Kickstart training, you decide together how to structure the menu. It is optional, lasts about 3 hours, is given live and costs a one-time 990 euros.

The training pays off when a team wants to start with confidence. If your team already has a clear list of questions and a sense of the structure, you can begin right away. If you want a shared session where the structure is decided together, the Kickstart gives you a good result in one afternoon. Either way, bring your list of colleague questions, because that list is the raw material for the session. If you are still choosing a supplier, choosing a Dutch image management supplier lists hosting and support points to compare.

Examples of Colleague Questions and the Structure They Suggest

To make this concrete, the table below shows how some example questions translate into structure in Beeldbank.nl.

Designing the Beeldbank for Speed and Adoption

One benefit of the questions-first method is adoption. When colleagues helped identify the questions and see their own terminology in the filters, they are more likely to use the system. Contrast this with an administrator designing a perfect structure that nobody understands. The image bank should feel familiar to the team, not like a framework they have to learn.

This is also a reason to stay within five to eight questions. Every extra field is one more thing to fill in at upload and one more thing to explain. Aim for a structure that is lean enough to maintain and rich enough to match how colleagues describe images to each other. Review it after a few weeks and remove the fields nobody uses.

What a Well-Structured Image Bank Enables for a Dutch Team

A structure built on the questions your team actually asks is the difference between a tool everyone uses and a system that sits unused because nobody can navigate it. For teams that run photos from a communication department, photo management for communication departments follows the workflow from upload to use.

Structure is a listening exercise. The teams that succeed ask colleagues what they need and build around those needs. That is the idea behind the advice from Beeldbank.nl to start with five to eight real questions: the best structure is the one your team will use every day.

Before You Move Photos: Test Your Current Folders with the Same Questions

If your photos currently live in a shared drive, use the same questions to test it. Can colleagues answer their five to eight most common questions in that folder tree without asking someone? If not, you have found the reasons to move. Keep your question list, because it is also the plan for your new structure in Beeldbank.nl.