Race Day Photos Beta Released

As part of the RaceDay Go Platform, RaceDay Photos (see previous Sneak Preview and Architecture blogs) has been released in Beta for general use.

RaceDay Photos is a comprehensive, open platform to provide races with cutting edge technology to create a better race day experience for their participants:

The Beta Platform is being provided for free to any race. The core platform will continue to be free for races that use RunSignUp’s registration system; there will be incremental costs for features that have a cost per unit to them, such as manual bib tagging with Mechanical Turk and TXT messaging of photos. Pricing will also be announced later for races and photographers who use the platform for races not using RunSignUp for registration. Race Day Photos will also be available for other technology providers such as registration and timing system companies to license at very low costs compared with what it would cost to build the system on their own.

Beta Features:

• Scalable upload of photos (tested at 100,000 3MB photos in one hour)
• Scalable storage of photos
• Upload multiple course locations and photo sets
• Multiple years upload (yes, you can upload photos from previous years)
• Automatic Google Vision Bib Tagging
• Automatic creation of thumbnails and large images for optimizing performance
• Automatic optional watermarking with race logo

• 

• Integrated with RaceDay Results
• Automatic sync with results data – generating “Near Time” tagging of photos
• Private (logged in race participant) or public viewing of photos
• Download of original (with watermark)

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be making incremental improvements based on feedback. We plan on releasing the following features:

• Optional Mechanical Turk manual tagging (for cost)
• Optional TXT messaging of photos when tagged (for cost)
• More watermarking capabilities – pponsors, multiple watermarks, data-based watermarks like finisher name, place and time
• Additional performance enhancement with Content Delivery Network for massive scalability and high performance
• Crowdsource tagging options
• Payment options, such as charging for access to photos, or availability of non-watermark originals, etc.
• Integration with third party photo repositories such as SmugMug and MarathonFoto and BackPrint
• Social Sharing options
• Integration with RaceJoy
• Improved RaceDay Results display with integrated photos
• Improved Profile with photo access so frequent users of RaceDay Go will be able to see their own photos across races and years
• Integration with RunSignUp Email Marketing – for example send a photo from last year’s race to remind people to sign up this year

While the system is in Beta, it should be fully useable within the set of features we support noted above. We will be publishing more tutorials and information on Photos over the coming weeks and months. We welcome our users to publish guest blogs to suggest best ways to use the system.