Sorting running photos

[JackMcIntyre]

Hi,

After getting a good set of 600+ keepers from the Redcar Half Marathon today that will hopefully be going to an agency, I'm wondering how poeple sort the images out for use with agencys - are there any programs that can automatically read the numbers on their shirts or are all images manually sorted? If they are all done manually, is it done by the photographer or by the agency?

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Musicman]

I suppose you could try using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that may have come with a scanner you own for reading text on scanned documents.

However, I reckon it will probably be quicker and more accurate to do it by hand. You'd probably have to copy and paste the result into your image management software (e.g. Lightroom, Adobe Bridge). By the time you've done that, it's likely quicker to eyeball it and type in the number.

If you're on a Mac, it's possible that you might be able to automate the process using Automator (/Applications/Automator.app) and/or AppleScript. Depends on the AppleScript support in the software you're using.

Or perhaps some kind of macro application like QuickSilver or QuicKeys. There may be something similar for Windows.

TBH, unless you're going to be doing lots of it on a regular basis, I'd probably go with doing it manually.

 

[JEmerson]

At you sending 600 to an agency?

It always fastest to caption and tag it manually, but then again I tend to have 75 or so shots that are bein uploaded.

 

[JackMcIntyre]

At you sending 600 to an agency?

It always fastest to caption and tag it manually, but then again I tend to have 75 or so shots that are bein uploaded.

They need to be set up so a runner can log onto the site, type in his number and then have all of the photos containing his number come onto the screen - how would I embed this information easily and quickly to each image?

 

[JEmerson]

I would've just used lightroom and added the numer as a keyword in the IPTC? If your not captioning it'll only take six or seven seconds per shot. (Less than a hours work).

Thats how I'd do it.

 

[snappingsam]

There is a company promoting software that will read barcodes - both 2d and 3d and will then renumber the file to the number - but that would mean getting the barcode onto the bibs.... which is fine if you are the offical photographers and this was allowed, and it was done well ahead of time!

Handy though for schools work - you just get the kid to hold a sheet with their name and barcode in frame but below the crop....