About
Six problems sports photographers and athletic departments live with. Six things we did about each one.
GalleryID was built around the work photographers and athletic departments were already doing, and the unpaid hours they spent doing it. It's two products, not one: GalleryID Desktop captions on your own Mac or PC with nothing uploaded, and GalleryID Cloud is the hosted, searchable archive. Each section below is a problem we lived with. What follows it is what we built in response.
Problem 01
The game ends. The tagging starts. Saturday in October. A regional tournament weekend. The deliverable is named — but it took the next morning to get there.
Nobody pays for that hour. The deliverable does. The labor underneath it doesn't.
CaptionID writes the athlete's name and the full caption line from the roster bound to the folder — one press or a shortcode, no headshots needed. Index headshots and MatchID starts making those presses for you: it reads each frame, finds the faces and the numbers, and matches them against your roster.
The post-game hour disappears. The named photos are still there.
Problem 02
Most platforms tag inside the platform. Export the file to Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, or a wire service — the names don't come with it.
The platform becomes the prison.
Both products write athlete names into XMP and IPTC PersonInImage metadata. GalleryID Desktop writes them as you tag, on your own machine. GalleryID Cloud writes them on download. Open the file in Photo Mechanic and the names are already there. Send it to AP and they go with it.
The file is yours. The names are in it.
Problem 03
Football helmets. Catcher's masks. Goalie visors. Ski goggles. Standard facial recognition gives up on the toughest frame of the night — the action shot under the helmet.
That's where most identification tools stop.
Jersey numbers read off the frame, and the roster bound to that folder or gallery narrows who it could be. Most helmet-sport frames get named anyway.
The uncertain ones land in the review queue. No silent wrong answers.
Problem 04
Most identification platforms charge 1 to 3 cents per image. Hundreds of photos per game becomes thousands by the playoffs, tens of thousands across a season.
The bill compounds as the season gets bigger. The harder you work, the more they take.
MatchID is included in both products and neither meters it. In GalleryID Cloud it's unlimited on all plans and storage is the only thing that scales. In GalleryID Desktop it runs on your own machine, so there's nothing to meter in the first place.
$20 a month or $800 a month in Cloud, same workflow, same review queue, same XMP. Desktop is per computer, and the identification is unmetered either way.
Problem 05
$25 to $50 per user, per month. Add the photographer, the SID, the marketing lead, the design intern, the freelancer covering Saturday.
By the time the department is connected, the bill is built on people, not work.
In GalleryID Cloud, add the whole department, the freelance team, and whoever runs the social channel. Adding the next person doesn't change the bill.
Storage scales. Seats don't. GalleryID Desktop is licensed per computer instead, because it runs on yours.
Problem 06
A lot of AI tools improve by training on customer uploads. Your shots become part of their next release. Your athletes become part of their training set.
Their model gets sharper. You get nothing.
The base MatchID model was trained on our own photographic archive — hundreds of thousands of sports photos — before any client uploaded a frame.
In GalleryID Cloud your photos and rosters stay scoped to your account. They don't flow back to our model and don't show up in another client's results. In GalleryID Desktop the question doesn't arise: identification runs on your machine and nothing is uploaded at all.
Six problems. Two products.
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