What does a same-day sports photography workflow look like?
Upload during the match rather than after it, cull to the keepers, let the album sort itself by athlete, and send one gallery link per player or per team. The work that used to happen at home in the evening happens while you are still at the ground, so the gallery is live before the crowd has left.
The four stages
- Ingest during play. FTP from the camera means there is no import to sit down to.
- Cull to the keepers. Volume is the enemy of a same-day turnaround. A tight set delivered tonight beats a complete set on Thursday.
- Sort by athlete. Recognition groups the album by person so you never tag by hand.
- Deliver per athlete. One link each, rather than one folder everyone has to search.
The bottleneck is almost never shooting
Photographers who move to same-day delivery usually find the shoot was never the slow part. The evening was: importing, culling, tagging and uploading a match that was over hours earlier. Removing the import and the tagging removes most of the evening.