How PlayerID Helps Teams Capitalize on Viral Moments

Former BYU cross-country runner Makenna Myler went viral after a grueling year of training to become a professional athlete in the summer of 2021.

In a TikTok made by her husband that featured footage of superhuman runs while pregnant, the process of qualifying for the Olympic trials and landing a professional partnership with shoe retailer ASICS, he writes, “I turned in my resignation papers and will be living vicariously through my wife and daughter going forward.” We’re right there with him.

To date, Mike’s TikTok has more than a million views and rightfully so. It’s unsurprising that sports publications took note and have since run features on Makenna’s incredible athletic abilities.

Stories like Makenna’s have helped raise awareness for women athletes training during and after pregnancy and childbirth. (Cue Mia Ham’s “Anything you can do I can do better” Gatorade commercial popular in the 90’s.)

Viral moments represent huge opportunities for college athletic programs.

Luckily, PhotoShelter Artificial Intelligence was built for moments like these.

If you’re BYU, you want to be able to find pictures of Makenna quickly and easily to put on your website or post on your Instagram feed. That’s where automated metadata tagging comes in.

Under the umbrella of PhotoShelter AI, we offer technology for every use case — ObjectID, PlayerID, LogoID and PeopleID. Using machine learning to scan images and automatically add tags for objects, people, players, important brand marks and jersey numbers, PhotoShelter AI can do it all.

How PlayerID Can Help

Our sports-obsessed solution, PlayerID, allows anyone to identify your full lineup of athletes in real time, helping you stay organized while speeding up your team’s photo workflow. This means facial and jersey recognition can be synced up with your entire roster ahead of time to accelerate the tagging process and get photos out the door faster and more precisely.

Finding pictures of Makenna during her BYU days can now happen in seconds, not hours or days.

No matter whether the image is a close-up of a single player, the team during a huddle or an action shot, PlayerID can identify and tag everyone. The accuracy is unbeatable.

From Viral Moments to Winning Championships

Some of your favorite teams, leagues and leading sports organizations are already using PlayerID to automate their facial and jersey recognition so tagging images during March Madness and the Super Bowl can be a simple and seamless process. No more delays due to manual tagging. No more names misspelled or just outright missing in the metadata. No more current or former players lost in your archive. No more digging through folders to find the perfect photo on or after game day.

“It’s important to keep up with new technology like PhotoShelter AI. It can help speed up your workflow so you have more time.”

Nate Edwards, Manager of Photography at BYU

With PlayerID on your side, it’s easy for your team to find images of your star players when they need them, quickly grab scroll-stopping content to contribute to a relevant trending topic on social media like Makenna’s, or even cull together a series of photos that highlight how your team’s visual identity has evolved over the years.

Ready to improve your workflow?

• ObjectID finds objects in your images and delivers the best and most accurate general metadata tags for your brand’s images.
• PeopleID uses facial recognition to find and tag the most important people to your organization in your image assets automatically, making the search for photos of faculty or influencers hassle-free.
• PlayerID combines jersey data and facial recognition for powerful athlete recognition.
• LogoID recognizes key sponsors and brands, with the capability to deliver relevant assets to your partners and stakeholders in real-time.