Large team action shot file organization question

Sorry for the wall of text :-/

Short-ish question (background follows): I'm shooting action shots of kids swimming laps, maybe 3 pool lengths per kid, with all the kids interleaved through the afternoon. I want to separate each kid into a gallery for their parents. I don't know all of the kids, but I need to associate their name with their gallery. I'm on a 1D3, which can attach audio to an image. So, is an audio clip of each kid's name the easiest way to do this with a crush of kids coming at me for four hours?

I've shot my kids' swim team for a couple years as a big team fundraiser. I shoot the team portrait and the action stuff in the water, and another team dad/friend shoots portraits. It's a lot of damn work (250 kids on the team, and we only shoot those who sign up to pay up front, and I still come home with 3000 images). So, this year I'm donating the proceeds from selling 8x10 team prints for $10 (looking at just over $1000 donated before printing costs so far), but we are charging for income for the individual portrait and action shots, and have raised prices to 2x the donation price from previous years.

So, previous years, I was comfortable tossing all of the keeper action shots into one gallery and letting the parents find their kids. I'm thinking that it's better to separate into individual/sibling galleries since this is a commercial operation now, so somehow I need to associate a file on my card with a name. I think audio clips are the way to go, but I'm wondering if anyone has a better idea.

Does anyone think I should just save the energy drop and all the keepers into one folder again, or is that too rough of a customer experience? Customers will be choosing two images from watermarked versions to receive full-size digital copies, and paying another $5 per additional digital copy. "Sitting fee" for the action shots is $30, which includes the 2 digitals, and I'm sitting on about 50 kids for these shots right now.

What about doing something visual to denote an event change? Take a picture of the pool deck or the water between each kid, so it'll be obvious from the thumbnails where each batch begins and ends. Combine that with a shot of a schedule, and you should have everything you need to break it out. I usually shoot schedules on my phone, rather than my SLR, so I have something to refer to -- eg, lane 5 in heat 3.

its what I would do at the track days between sessions. I always had my ipad mini near and just made a note and shot it. "Red 1" "blue 3" "gold 2" etc etc. Just figure out some quick shorthand to at least break up the events and a small pad of paper.

patrickpkt wrote in post #16936016
What about doing something visual to denote an event change? Take a picture of the pool deck or the water between each kid, so it'll be obvious from the thumbnails where each batch begins and ends. Combine that with a shot of a schedule, and you should have everything you need to break it out. I usually shoot schedules on my phone, rather than my SLR, so I have something to refer to -- eg, lane 5 in heat 3.

Thanks. Good idea, and I've done similar in the past for sure (shooting event/heat cards is a huge help). I wish that this was that organized, and that I had explained it better.

This is a photo shoot event, during a regular practice. I have around 70 swimmers to shoot (out of the 250 on the team). I will arrange them into 15-minute buckets on a schedule. They will line up and take turns swimming, and will return to the line if I have more work to do. Most will do 2 or three lengths, depending on stroke preferences and how quickly I learn their rhythm and form deformities (younger swimmers often look like drowning victims in the wrong part of the butterfly).

So, when one swimmer is done, the bucket will empty, and a volunteer may let people from the next bucket start to join in. There won't be any hard lines between the buckets, and surely some will be late or need to shoot early for some reason.

Last two years, I just took a nice smile shot of each swimmer at the end of their first swim. That let the parents easily find their kid in the ~1000 keepers that I posted. I could do that this time, with an audio note. Have you tackled a problem like this with a different workflow?

Then I have to think about how badly I want to create 50 galleries (siblings can share) and make sure the right parent gets the right link with a unique password. :-/

Since you're not jumping around the lanes and are focusing on a specific athlete, I'd either go with the voice annotation and/or shoot a notebook binder that has the name of each player on a single page (once you're done with that swimmer, rip the page out of the binder and you know who you still have to cover).

Where do you host your photos? Does the site support keywords? If so, it would be much easier to add the athlete's name as a keyword to the images and to provide the keyword URL than to create a bunch of folders. As an example, for smugmug, the following url would be used http://www.yoursite.co​m/keyword/athletename/

Thanks for the ideas everyoe.

pat.kane, I use Smugmug, and I agree a scheme like you suggest should be good. Are "keywords" different on Smugmug than folders and galleries? It would be interesting if a keyword could pull only certain images out of a gallery -- I'll have to dig around a bit and see what's possible.

I think the voice deal might be a good way to try, because I'll be laying on a thermarest on a wet deck. The big kids will put about three gallons on me even if they skip their last stroke, so a tablet or paper are out of the question. I'll be covering the camera and won't be able to worry about anything else. A quick preview and voice deal should be doable though.

Then it's just a matter of what to do with the info and the massive haul of images.

Yes, keywords are different than folders and galleries. They are an additive capability. In addition to having the keyword url capability, keywords are also used by the search engine on smugmug, so you'd have additional options to filter the search.

By using the keyword url, all photos of the athlete are returned, e.g., the following link returns photos of Jeff from four different galleries: sports posters, 2 baseball games and a football game
http://www.dmvpix.com/​keyword/Jeff%20Kruger/

Alternatively, just enter "kruger" into the search bar at the top right of my site. This is the approach I recommend for your event, i.e., add the names as keywords, upload everything to one gallery and tell the parents to hit your main page and to enter their last name into the search box to see the photos of their kid(s).

pat.kane, you should be a SmugMug hero (or maybe I should have taken them up on the offer to watch videos on how to use the site )

Thanks for the help. With audio cues, this should be pretty easy.

I've been on their site for 10+ years, so I'm pretty familiar with the features. It has been great to see how far digital photography and hosting has progressed over the last decade.

If this is something you do every year, and some effort would carry over into next year, I'd get a bunch of index cards and put them on a big ring (kind of like the notebook idea) with a number (figuring you can save this and reuse the numbers for other future similar events). Have a list of who you need to get shots of, then in excel put a number column next to the names. Numbers correlate to cards, and those you can tie back to names. Shoot the number before and after the athlete, this sandwich provides a safety net of doing it twice (so if you're rushed and miss one you aren't hosed) and it will make them easier to grab in your file management process.

You could use the audio tags, but since you can get lists ahead of time, it's probably going to be faster using a good photo management program (like Photo Mechanic or LR).

Next I'd take that list of #s and names, and turn it into a code replacement file in windows notebook or equivalent. Then Select the athlete photos pull up the metadata editor and put the coded number into the comments section (where the cursor defaults for me in PM and I know it works for searches in smugmug).

If you do it this way and the names are all properly spelled, you could break them down to folders and rename the folders to match, but I'd just put them into one and let the search function be part of the instructions.

Unfortunately swimming doesn't make it easy by numbering the athletes for you unlike most other sports.