Greetings, as its my first time on Adobe forums Ill give a run down of who I am, if this doesn't matter skip the next paragraph.
My name is Ian, I work as a college sports photographer mainly with two Universities (UMBC and Towson in Baltimore) as well as a few professional and club teams. Thus I have photographed the same teams for years and have a lot of images of each player. I shoot Nikon (doesn't really matter) but shoot almost everything in RAW if possible and then cull in PhotoMechanic and edit and organize in Lightroom sorting and flagging using a combination of ratings and color labels to sort my best photos and highlights for each event. Thus I can quickly find my best photos and through metadata sorting the best photos or my exported highlights for each event or date.
An issue Ive been trying to work around is finding all of my photos of a specific player or player number. I get asked weekly by our Sports department or players or parents themselves for photos of a specific player and I have to go through manually and find them if its even worth the effort. I ave messed around with Lightroom's and even Google Photo's facial recognition but in the end it takes a lot of time to manually enter player names and isn't the most accurate, facial recognition also doesn't identify the back of someone's head or their face under a helmet and some of my best shots are of that variety where they simply don't have an identifiable face in them. My idea for this is a plugin for Lightroom or a completely separate application that uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to find Numbers instead of faces in photos and tag them with those numbers by embedding it in their metadata. I have no idea if this already exists in some form but I haven't been able to find it. I know that I genuinely need something like this for the future because once my catalogs get big enough I simply wont be able to find ALL of my pictures of a player. This is definitely an application for OCR that's limited to sports photography where players are required to have a text character prominently displayed but I can imagine marathon photographers use similar technology to identify based on the number on a bib (unless they're doing that by hand for thousands of people). I'm interested in any solutions other photographers have made use of and/or if you think this technology could work. Thanks for reading this.
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