Glossy Finish built Templified to streamline sports photography production, and now you can use it, too

For Matt Winer and the team at renowned sports photography company Glossy Finish, the motivation for developing its new Templified service was straightforward: They had a high-volume sports photography workflow that worked, but they knew it could work much better. The result is a cloud-based graphics production platform designed to automate the process of turning athlete photographs into individual portraits, team composites, trading cards and other sports photography products.

“We knew that there were things that we struggled at, and we knew that we could make it better and faster,” said Winer, who is CTO and partner at Glossy Finish. “Let me sit down and brainstorm this and figure out, like, what are our true pain points?”

For years, the company used a popular desktop software product for its production needs. The software was important to the Glossy Finish operation, but its Windows-based architecture and workflow meant the company increasingly supplemented it with tools including Zapier, Dropbox and other workarounds. This required on-site designers at each of Glossy Finish’s tournament locations.

Templified replaces much of that patchwork with a cloud workflow, where Glossy Finish’s graphics staff can work remotely. This is major time and expense savings, while improving turnaround times.

“We take the photo, it drops right into Templified, and the graphics team gets a notification, like ‘Hey, here’s a new team that we’re photographing,’ and they can start building the team photo,” Winer said.

Built for volume

The importance of shaving seconds from production becomes obvious at Glossy Finish’s scale. At just its Cooperstown baseball operation alone, Winer said the company can photograph between 1,000 and 1,200 athletes in a day or even half a day.

Using the Templified Tether application, photographers can capture images on a Mac, iPhone or iPad and associate them with roster data. Once an image enters Templified, workflows can automatically remove the background, place the athlete into one or more templates, insert dynamic information such as the player’s name and add the athlete to a team composite. Individual products can be essentially hands-off.

“These individuals and these shareables are 100% automated,” Winer said. “There’s no human touch there.” The exception is the team photograph, where a designer may still adjust player sizes and positioning, but even there, Templified dramatically reduces production time.

Glossy Finish generally photographs athletes from tallest to shortest so the tallest player appears in the center of the team composite. If someone arrives late or athletes are photographed out of sequence, the designer can reorder and re-layout the group.

“It takes us less than 30 seconds to build a team photo,” Winer said. With the previous workflow, “an experienced person” could take about a minute and a half. Multiplied across hundreds or thousands of teams, those seconds become substantial labor savings.

Moving the graphics department off-site

But Winer sees an even greater advantage in moving production to the cloud.

Glossy Finish operates simultaneous events in multiple locations. With Templified, the company no longer has to put graphics personnel at every event. A designer working in New Jersey can process a team photographed elsewhere and send a finished proof directly to a printer at the event.

“The graphic designer says, okay, I’m done with this team photo. I’m gonna print a proof,” Winer explained. That proof could then print in Myrtle Beach—or wherever the event is taking place—without the on-site sales staff doing anything.

That capability isn’t limited to photographers selling on-site; images can be cued for later delivery.

“Not everybody’s doing onsite printing,” Winer said. “Not everybody is doing remote graphics or needs it right away.” In those cases, production can still happen while the photographer is shooting. “By the time you get back to the studio or to the office, you’re done.”

Building workflows instead of just templates

Despite its name, Templified is more than a template designer. Photographers can create workflows determining what happens to each photograph after capture.

A single athlete image, for example, might have its background removed before being inserted into a player portrait, magazine cover, plaque, trading card and team composite. Templates can incorporate custom fonts, dynamic graphics, photographs, logos and other elements.

Each event—or even individual teams within an event—can have a different workflow. A photographer covering baseball and softball simultaneously could automatically send athletes into different sets of templates. Templates could also vary based on team colors.

Finished files can then be routed to different destinations, including printing, webhooks and other services. Winer said direct integrations with professional labs are also on the roadmap.

“I’d be happy to start talking to some labs and get some direct integrations,” he said.

Glossy Finish built Templified as a tool to solve problems its own staff encounted while producing sports photography at scale but is now making it available for any photographer to use. Templified offers a simple, subscription-free, pay-as-you-go model for customers. Simply buy credits ahead of time (at about 4.4 cents per image render and 10-cents per photo background removal); users can start with 25 free renders to see if they like it.

The first outside users were members of its GFCrew Pro community, an obvious testing ground because those photographers operate in similar event environments, and now Templified is built into the GF Crew-GFITpro platforms. Photographers won’t have access to GF Crews’ own designers but can create workflows to get images via Dropbox, Zapier, or even webhooks and APIs.