If you’ve taken a look at the front page of The Daily Tar Heel’s site in the past day or so, you might have noticed something a little different going on.

We’ve just completed work on a few new templates that make this sort of "featured images" functionality easy to set up and manage. Both the large "Photo of the Week" and the gallery of thumbnails below are populated by searching the database of images for a specific piece of metadata info. Any piece, really — keyword, credit line, location, category …

One of the more common usages would be to assign a unique IPTC keyword to images you’d like to appear on the page. Do that right in Photoshop or your favorite piece of image management software (or in Fotobroker’s administration area) and the template is updated automatically as soon as the new images are imported. That means your "featured images" can be rotated out as often as every day.

We’re looking forward to building on this feature even more, giving you further control over showcasing your site’s best images. In the meantime, if you like what you see at photos.dailytarheel.com, you can have it too! Let us know, and we’ll get you set up.