Bringing AI to Trail Runner Photos
Getting your photos is about to get a lot easier.
We love the capturing your moment on the trail: digital proof of grit, a memory shared with friends, and sometimes the inspiration needed to sign up for the next big challenge. As our community and our races continue to grow, it is time we upgrade the system we use to deliver photography to you. That’s why we’re so excited to announce a new photography system today! We also want to be transparent with you about some of the challenges we’re working through.
The Problem with the "Photo Dump"
Historically, we have uploaded all race photos to massive Google Drive folders. While this minimizes cost to the community, we know it’s not the ideal solution for you. The time for each of you to spend hours clicking through 10,000+ unsorted cropped photos just to determine if you have any pics is not a great experience. Similarly, it would be prohibitively expensive paid labor to manually sort through all those photos to tag the bibs and runners by hand.
Screenshot below
Screenshot of selfie search tool
AI Smart Recognition
Our new system offers fantastic facial and bib recognition. This allows you to upload a selfie or enter your bib number and instantly find photos of yourself. The results are impressive: you can find practically every photo of yourself in seconds. You don’t need any special tools, just visit photos.trailroots.com and you’ll be able to find photos from past races available for download.
We’ve been really impressed with the quality of the smart recognition. As with all AI, it is not perfect. But otherwise, we’re very impressed. Crinkled bib? No problem. Low quality selfies? Easy. Looking for that one group pic you accidentally photo bombed with your head turned? It will likely match it! Perhaps one of the best features is that it only scans the images once. This makes the selfie search practically instant and exceptionally efficient. In short, we think it will save quite a bit of effort and you’re going to love it!
What’s the Cost?
For the time being, we’ll continue to absorb the cost of photos and the new delivery system. If we do ever charge a fee to access photos in the future, we expect it to be very reasonable or as an option in addition to the Google Drive dump. We love our trail runner photos, so our goal is to facilitate photo sharing. We can also share some of the ideas we don’t think will work:
We don’t want to pad the registration fees. We want trail running to be as accessible as possible and we don’t like the idea of a blanket price increase.
We don’t want to sell photo access. We cannot guarantee that every single runner will get a perfect action shot (that’s the nature of trail running!), so it probably isn’t feasible to sell a photo access-pass at registration.
Where You Come In: Making it Sustainable
We need to be realistic: photography already represents a significant expense and logistical challenge. The added cost of this new service is a real factor that we also have to balance. For this to be a long-term, sustainable benefit, we need to see that it is truly valuable to the community. Here are some of the ways we’re looking to determine what value this has for you:
1. Use the System: When we send out the smart photo links, use them! Our usage metrics are the strongest indicator of demand. If nobody is looking for their photos, we can't justify the expense.
2. Share & Tag Us: If you find a photo you love, share it on Instagram, Strava, and the like. This is crucial. When you tag us, you are directly helping us grow the community. This helps others discover the community organically. This will be an important metric for us to evaluate.
3. Crowdsourcing: Since we’re unable to have photographers at every beautiful vista or grueling climb, we’d love to see the shots from you all! If you share your photos with us and allow us to reuse them, we’ll be able to better allocate photographers to take the hero shots of you! We are working on setting up an easy way for spectating members of our community to "donate" their photos to the central pool. Until then, we’d appreciate you sharing photos with us in whatever manner works best for you.
The Path Forward
We want you to have those memories. We also want to keep registration costs down. Our goal is to balance those two things. By utilizing the smart system, sharing your favorites, and donating crowdsourced photos, we can hopefully build a system where everyone wins.
