Sports photogs - any interest in a remote PP service?

snaphappi

I need suggestions from sports phototographers on how you might use a remote photo-processing service to offload some of your post-processing workflow. Here are some basic capabilities we have in place:

• sort through photos to pick out the top 50% (?) of photos
• tag photos by team, maybe even jersey number
• hand crop photos (i.e. for 4x6, 5x7 printing)
• modify/organize IPTC/EXIF tags
• staging to hosting or proofing site

This is meant to be a low-cost, high volume service to help prepare photos for resale to parents. Hand cropping, for example, might be priced at $20-30 per 1000 photos. (At these prices, we do not do photoshop.)


Our general capabilities are in place, plus we have tools to quickly move photos back and forth and offer quick turnaround. But how would you combine these capabilities to make a service that would save you time and improve your sales?


We have done 1 test on baseball photos, email me for samples.



Thanks,


m.

tjk60

I applaud you for looking for ways to make some money, but I can't think of when I would use such a service. If I was shooting a hockey tournament for example, I'd have to have the pics available in < 15 minutes. If I'm shooting for the paper, much the same. If I'm shooting for my own sales, I rarely take more than 30 minutes to cull, crop and start the upload.

Where do you think this would fit in?

snaphappi

tjk60 wrote:

I applaud you for looking for ways to make some money, but I can't think of when I would use such a service. If I was shooting a hockey tournament for example, I'd have to have the pics available in < 15 minutes. If I'm shooting for the paper, much the same. If I'm shooting for my own sales, I rarely take more than 30 minutes to cull, crop and start the upload.

Where do you think this would fit in?

For the first test, we processed about 20 Little League games, shot over 2 weeks. Altogether it was about 15,000 photos. We culled the outtakes, close-cropped the remaining photos to 5x7, separated them by team, then uploaded to the hosting server for online purchase.

From there, it was easy for parents to review and purchase photos of their kids (about 200-250 per team) and sales were pretty good - avg spend was about $20 for each kid in the league. Email me if you want to see some samples of our work.

I suppose I am more interested in the "sell to parents" market -- not for publication. When you shoot for your own sales, are all the photos close-cropped for parents to review? How does your average sales compare? Perhaps it comes down to whether additional post-processing will increase your online or even your onsite sales.

I'm searching for a way this type of service can be replicated on a bigger scale, and I'm open to any ideas.

chuckice

What are the associated cost breakdowns? How do you envision a field photog "running" the images to you? Are you working with NEF/RAW and/or jpg and/or tiff?

snaphappi

chuckice wrote:

What are the associated cost breakdowns? How do you envision a field photog "running" the images to you? Are you working with NEF/RAW and/or jpg and/or tiff?

Right now, we are strictly working with JPG photos. And for now, any test would require transport is by overnight FTP -- our platform is currently server-based (linux). But if I can find a market for individual photogs, then there is a possibility of porting the platform to PC/Mac desktops.

chuckice

snaphappi wrote:

Right now, we are strictly working with JPG photos. And for now, any test would require transport is by overnight FTP -- our platform is currently server-based (linux). But if I can find a market for individual photogs, then there is a possibility of porting the platform to PC/Mac desktops.

What are the cost breakdowns for each of these?

Here are some basic capabilities we have in place:

• sort through photos to pick out the top 50% (?) of photos
• tag photos by team, maybe even jersey number
• hand crop photos (i.e. for 4x6, 5x7 printing)
• modify/organize IPTC/EXIF tags
• staging to hosting or proofing site

ian408

I would think turnaround time is of the utmost importance.

The longer it takes to get things into a parents hands, the harder the sell will be. As mentioned, you want photos available ASAP of a tourney--otherwise people forget. Especially if they've come from out of town.

snaphappi

chuckice wrote:

What are the cost breakdowns for each of these?

I don't have exact breakdowns for each line item, because right now my costs are "fungible" -- i.e. until the service is standardized and reaches a minimum volume, my biggest costs are my own time doing the manual tweaks and customizations to support a pilot. But as I said above, something like the service described about could be as low as $20/1000 photos if I could get really good, steady volume.

What I'm hoping for is some kind of insight from the community about what combination(s) of services add the most value to indie sports photographers. This would have to take into account issues related to upload and turnaround times as mentioned above as well.

I understand tourneys need overnight turnaround for onsite sales, but would league shots or prep games allow for a longer turnaround? Right now, we could probably do 4-5K photos a day. But if the lead time is there we could easily scale up to support a bigger pilot.

Fundamentally, I think the issue boils down to whether or not you can sell more photos back to the parents -- either onsite or online -- if your shots were culled for outtakes and cropped. And whether it is cost-effective to send this work out instead of doing it yourself. I'm willing to do sample work or even plan a pilot to help figure this out. Any ideas, any takers?

tjk60

snaphappi wrote:

I don't have exact breakdowns for each line item, because right now my costs are "fungible" -- i.e. until the service is standardized and reaches a minimum volume, my biggest costs are my own time doing the manual tweaks and customizations to support a pilot. But as I said above, something like the service described about could be as low as $20/1000 photos if I could get really good, steady volume.

What I'm hoping for is some kind of insight from the community about what combination(s) of services add the most value to indie sports photographers. This would have to take into account issues related to upload and turnaround times as mentioned above as well.

I understand tourneys need overnight turnaround for onsite sales, but would league shots or prep games allow for a longer turnaround? Right now, we could probably do 4-5K photos a day. But if the lead time is there we could easily scale up to support a bigger pilot.

Fundamentally, I think the issue boils down to whether or not you can sell more photos back to the parents -- either onsite or online -- if your shots were culled for outtakes and cropped. And whether it is cost-effective to send this work out instead of doing it yourself. I'm willing to do sample work or even plan a pilot to help figure this out. Any ideas, any takers?

Tourneys do not need overnight turnaround, they need to be available by the end of the game you are shooting. If they are not your sales go way down, although some do not offer onsite printing...

chuckice

The price is right but it wouldn't be of much use to me unless it was same day turn-around and the option to work with NEF as some files just need that effort.

Sledhed

Sorry to say I wouldn't have a need for such a service. For the MLB games I shoot they have to be captioned, keyworded and all of the other IPTC info enetered and a lot of times I'm sending while I'm still shooting. For youth sports all I do is cull and upload. I don't crop or do anything to the photos until they sell.

snaphappi

Sledhed wrote:

Sorry to say I wouldn't have a need for such a service. For the MLB games I shoot they have to be captioned, keyworded and all of the other IPTC info enetered and a lot of times I'm sending while I'm still shooting. For youth sports all I do is cull and upload. I don't crop or do anything to the photos until they sell.

Would anybody be interested in doing a test? I'd like to discover if online sales would increase if the photos were already sorted by teams, closely-cropped and ready-to-buy. It makes the online experience more impulsive for parents, and that's got to help sales.