Event Photography - Competitor numbers - How?

TalkieT

For event photography - in this case Mountainbiking and MotoX, I'd like to have photos tagged with competitor numbers so they can search for themselves and/or for 'number obscured' pics. I know I could do this with keywords on each photo, but that's simply NOT a feasible option with hundreds of photos per event for me.

What I'd like is a local and super fast method of adding numbers (to IPTC perhaps) on my machine and then being able to search on Smugmug through those added fields.

I'm sure I'm not the first person with this issue - so how have other people solved this please?

Fast is better.... an ideal solution would involve a program slideshowing through, for each pic I could enter a number (or 'N' for none, or 'C' for crash, or 'C 98' for Crash number 98) and hit return to go to the next photo in the folder.

Help please, it's a little frustrating to have to go through all the photos when someone asks if I have shots of them.

Cheers - Neil Gardner

Dna

I think you have to do it with keywords.

I know that Breezebrowser will do bulk number keyword in the IPTC, so maybe you could do a race number and time ?!? Then the competitors know what race they were in and what time that it ran and can find themselves.

Try this one for a number search.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=63083

And these,

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=38113

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=58143

Hope that helps.

Andrew

William M Porter

TalkieT wrote:

For event photography - in this case Mountainbiking and MotoX, I'd like to have photos tagged with competitor numbers so they can search for themselves and/or for 'number obscured' pics. I know I could do this with keywords on each photo, but that's simply NOT a feasible option with hundreds of photos per event for me.

What I'd like is a local and super fast method of adding numbers (to IPTC perhaps) on my machine and then being able to search on Smugmug through those added fields.

Neil,

I also shoot events - girls basketball, volleyball, swimming, etc. When I know the names of the competitors, I like to add them to the IPTC data so that parents can find photos of their children quickly. I generally don't use keywords: I use the title field.

Now, you either have to do it manually, or try to do it automatically. There are programs, including Adobe PHotoshop Elements, that offer a form of face recognition. My experience with the feature is not extensive, but I've tried to get it to work repeatedly without great success. So there's really no getting around the fact that some human being has to eyeball every photo. The only question then is, what software provides the most efficient UI for editing metadata. Of all the programs I've tried, I'd say Lightroom is easily the strongest in this area. Using Lightroom, I can organize hundreds of photos in very quick order, at least in cases where I know already who's who.

My problem at the moment is not editing the metadata. It's that, while customizing my web site, I've managed to eliminate the search field! But I'll figure that out this weekend.

Will