Basketball gives you the one thing football and hockey do not: a clear look at the face and the number on almost every frame. What it takes away is time. An 82-game season with back-to-backs means you are rebuilding a roster file more often than any other sport. SnapCaption gets it down to about a minute, and the file loads into Photo Mechanic and GalleryID Desktop.
Free. No account required to build and download a file.
Every sport breaks a roster file in its own way. These are the ones that bite in NBA.
A trade can move four players between the two teams you are shooting tomorrow. Pull the roster on game day instead of patching a file you built in November.
Call-ups arrive with numbers you have never seen and leave again in a week. They are in the roster when you pull it, which is the only way to stay ahead of them.
No single NBA roster is hard. Doing it eighty times a season is. That is the part worth automating.
The export is not locked to one program. The same NBA roster file loads into Photo Mechanic and into GalleryID Desktop, with identical shortcodes either way.
Edit > Settings > Set Code Replacements > Load, then pick the file. The shortcodes are live in the caption fields immediately.
Code Replacement is the name Camera Bits, Inc. gives the feature in Photo Mechanic's own documentation, which is why this file is often called a code replacement roster file.
Attach the same file as a roster and the identical shortcodes expand while you caption. Nothing about the export changes.
GalleryID Desktop goes further than shortcodes — it identifies athletes by facial recognition and writes the names into the photo, so there is no code to type at all. See GalleryID Desktop
The h is the prefix you assigned the home team, 23 the jersey number. Give the visitors their own prefix and both rosters live in one file all night. Coaches get separate codes because they have no number.
You choose the columns. The export is a tab-separated file, so anything that reads a tab-delimited roster can use it.
30 teams, kept current from in-season sources. Pick any two and build one file for the whole game.
In Photo Mechanic, go to Edit > Settings > Set Code Replacements, click Load, and select the downloaded file. GalleryID Desktop attaches the same file as a roster and expands the identical shortcodes while you caption.
Rosters sync from current-season sources, so a file built on game day reflects the roster that morning rather than whenever a spreadsheet was last maintained.
Yes, and it is the normal way to work a game. Assign each team its own prefix and export once, so there is no file to swap at halftime.
Yes. Coaches and staff get their own shortcodes rather than jersey-number codes, since they have no number to key off.
Pick your teams, set your codes, download the file. Free, and no account required.
Open the roster builder