Accessing the Photographer Tools

Race administrators can access the photographer tools from Racer Reports & Tools link on the race overview:

and then click on the Photo Tagging link:

Users who have been granted Photographer permissions will be taken directly to the photographer tools when they click on the race in their homepage.

Tagging Photos with Racer Numbers and Names

Authenticating

The photo tagging page will start out by asking for your Zenfolio username and password.  Make sure you’re entering your Zenfolio username and password, not your Zone4 password.  Your Zenfolio username will be saved, but for security reasons we don’t save the password – it’s used to get an authentication session from Zenfolio, which expires after 24 hours.  When your session with Zenfolio has expired, we’ll ask for your password again.

Selecting Photos

After you’ve entered your login information, you’ll be prompted to select the folder containing the photos you want to tag.  Click on a folder name to expand it, and click the Select button beside a folder that has photos in it to start tagging those photos:

Matching Photos to Recorded Times

When you’ve selected a folder containing some photos, the next step is to select a timing device that you want to use to match up with those photos.  In this example, we’ve been taking photographs of timing chips as they cross the device called “GoChip #244”, and uploaded those photos to a folder called “activator 244” in our Zenfolio account.

Select the appropriate timing device from the dropdown menu, and then click “Tag Photos” to see how the system will tag the photos in the selected folder.  This does not immediately apply the tags, you’ll get a chance to see what matches were made and correct things as necessary.  There’s a few other options on this screen as well to help you line up your photos with times:

• Matching Threshold: By default, we say a racer is in the picture if their time was recorded on the device within three seconds before or after the picture was taken.  If you’re taking pictures exactly as the racer crosses the line, you can decrease this threshold for more accurate matches, or you can increase the threshold if your pictures are being taken at more variable distances from the timing device.
• Time Delay: If your camera is out of sync with our timing system or if you’re taking pictures a few seconds away from the timing device, you can shift all the times by adding a delay here.  This can be a positive or negative number. 

  Zenfolio photos are not stored with a time zone – If you are attempting to tag the photos while your computer is set to a different time zone than the photos were taken in, you will need to add the time zone difference to the delay (3600 seconds x the number of hours difference).

• Start Matching & Stop Matching: If you only want to tag some of the pictures in this folder, you can set a time range to work in.   We default to the race’s start and end time.

You can edit these properties and hit the Tag Photos button to see it re-align the times with the new settings, until the photos and times are being matched up correctly.

Below that, you’ll see the list of pictures.  After clicking the Tag Photos button, each picture will have a title and list of racers beside it.  The title is simply the names of all the people we have matched with the picture.  The titles are editable, and will be saved along with the tags.

Below the title is the list of racers that have been matched with the photo.  If we’ve matched a racer incorrectly, you can click the red x beside that racer’s name.

And then below the list of racers that have been matched is a field where you can tag any racers that are in the photo but were not matched by any times on the timing device.  Enter the racer number that was missed into the field, and hit the Add Tag button or the enter key on your keyboard.

Applying Tags to the Photos

When you’re satisfied with the tags that have been assigned to the photos, hit the Save These Tags button at the bottom of the screen to save the tags on Zenfolio.  The title field will be set on each photo to match the title displayed in this tool, and the racer numbers will be stored in the Keywords field in zenfolio.  This will overwrite all existing keywords and titles on all photos in the folder, unless they have been excluded by the start and stop matching fields.

This process takes a while – usually somewhere between 0.5-1.5s per photo in our testing.  We have to make a separate request to Zenfolio’s server for each photo, wait for it to save, and then send the next photo.  We’ll show a counter of progress beside the save button.  You can close the browser and it will keep processing, but if you do that you won’t get any notification of when it’s done.

Creating an Extra Timing Point for Photographers

If you have timing loops that aren’t part of the race but will be used for tagging photos, create an extra timing point that isn’t assigned to any course, and attach the devices to it.

1. Navigate to Manage Timing Points under the Device Options menu on Course Setup
   

2. Click the Add a Timing Point button to create a new timing point.  You can use the drag handles on this page to re-order your timing points – the last point in the list is the default on the announcer page, so don’t put the photographer point as the last one if you’re using announcer results.

   

3. Add any photographer devices to the new timing point you’ve created.  You can leave them as timing devices, or switch them to backup devices – it doesn’t matter, as long as this timing point isn’t assigned to any course.

Granting a Photographer Access to the Race

On the main settings page of the race, find the Authorized Users section and click on Add a User:

On the following screen, enter the email address of the person you want to grant access to.  When they have been given access,  they will see the race on their homepage when they sign in to Zone4.

Viewing Photos on Racer Pages

At the bottom of the photo tagging tool, there’s a checkbox to Link to these photos from Zone4 public racer pages.  If racer pages are enabled for the race, clicking this checkbox will display any photos of the racer on the page that is accessed by clicking their name on results, like this:

The thumbnails link to the “PageUrl” property provided by ZenFolio, which appears to be the page where photos can be purchased.  For more information on racer pages, see the help page here.