I'll be shooting an event where dogs, in totally random order, come flying down a chute and jumping hurdles.

It's a fun-day thing rather than an organized competition, so getting running orders and such is out of the question. Kind of "pay a buck to run the shoots" thing.

I did it last year and it was surprisingly lucrative, but I'm looking for a better way to organize galleries this time around. Last time, I just posted a single Pbase gallery with all the dogs in it.

My thoughts so far are to have 4-6 different color cards to hand the owners at the end of the run. Then switch colors every 25-ish dogs or so. Then the owners would go to the "blue" gallery to look at photos.

Once I go through all the colors, I can have Red-1, Red-2 etc as needed.

I got about 10 photos per dog, 2-3 dogs per minute for three hours last year. Many of the dogs came back through multiple times to try for a faster run so I could have instances of the same dog in multiple galleries.

I thought about simply doing one gallery per hour (or half hour), but figure folks will not keep track of when their dogs were in the chutes vice playing frisbee or doing water retrieves. Oh, and I get to shoot all those too.

Thoughts?

Can you have someone handing out cards with the time (to the closest half hour or whatever) and website to the owners as they come out of the run? Possibly a good job for a highschool kid who likes either photo or dog stuff.

Then put the galleries up by time (or even if they aren't by time they could be sorted by time?).

Cards are cheap so more than one run maybe they get more than one card. Hardest part might be printing the times on the back in advance?

Just a thought--David

If I add the times to the cards, that would solve the problem of people forgetting when they ran.

I don't mind giving out more than one card for sure. Ideally, I'd sort all of one dog's photos together, but that's a lot of work when there is no real order to the event.

One really old tech idea might be to have a timeclock that would stamp each card as it was handed out. Most of the timeclocks I know of are the "old-fashioned" kind, but there might actually be some cool new versions that use inkjet or something or even a label printing solution that updated the time as it went?--David

Sounds expensive

I think we're going with colored chits with each 30 minute period getting a different color.

Pre-printed cards sound great. I think the time clock is only practical if you can get one on eBay for $25 or so from someone dumping theirs.--David

Well, a brain storm hit me in the middle of the night. Instead of giving people two pieces of paper to keep track of, we stopped and got colored dot stickers to put on the corner of my business card.

We did 6 sets of 50 in 6 different colors and handed out all but about 25 of them in 3.5 hours today as each dog finished its run through the hurdles.

We'll see what the results are.

Jim--That's a great solution (at least I hope it works out!).

Maybe with all the work on face recognition someone will come up with a dog recognition package and the images will sort themselves. Next year, perhaps:-)

Seems to have worked. I got 153 hits on the gallery since it was posted at 6PM last night and a lot of "favorites" selected. Let's hope that transmits to orders soon too.

I've actually thought about the face recognition features already included in iPhoto for sorting using handler faces, but I've not upgraded to the new iPhoto yet to try it out. Plus, I don't care for the program for much of anything else.

I think a couple of the consumer online galleries have also started adding face recognition/tagging, but aside from noticing the press releases go by I haven't tried them out.--David