In our new age of automation, it seemed for a while that sports photography was getting more difficult. For the past few years, many photography websites were making photographers manage their own tagging, labeling, and marketing. Particularly with Backprint's closure a few years ago, that full-service mentality disappeared, and photographers have been left to figure out their own way with companies like Zenfolio or Smugmug. Flashframe is here to change that.
Flashframe has built a suite of tools to help you manage your sports photography event from end to end. From recruitment, all the way to marketing and sales, Flashframe has optimized the workflow to ensure your event's success all with a few clicks of a button.
Recruitment
Flashframe has built a full recruitment portal allowing you to find your next photographer at your event. With our network of thousands of photographers already on the site, if you make a posting, the placement will show immediately for those looking for a gig. Additionally, every week a email goes out to photographers opted in--monthly, and quarterly, otherwise--telling them about gigs looking for photographers in their area. So far this has been a very successful tool in helping events and photography companies staff photographers quickly and easily.
Upload
Upload is something that's been an issue for users of our site, but we spoke to dozens of photographers to see how we could make it easier and better and found one common thread: FTP. FTP enables photographers to set a large upload of a few thousand photos through an FTP client, like Filezilla or Cyberduck, and forget it. They can come back a few hours later to see their upload complete, rather than having to babysit a browser client. Additionally, for photographers who own a network transmitter for their camera can immediately upload on course to our FTP server, allowing the photos to be available for purchase immediately.
Tagging
Flashframe got its start in the industry by being one of the first to use machine learning to tag photos in real-time, that said, we have added our patented color searching and time search to increase the likelihood of an athlete finding their photos. For all questionable photos, our process kicks them over to a human for manual review. We also have a bike-specific algorithm for those who specialize in biking or triathlon photography. If you're looking for all-human review, let our support team know and we can make that adjustment for you too. Whatever the case, as soon as you start uploading, let Flashframe worry about the tagging, and start enjoying your weekend, rather than dealing with tagging companies overseas at odd hours of the night.
Marketing
We know everyone hates marketing, and this has started to become an increasingly frustrating part of photographing endurance photography. Forget about setting up a mailchimp account because we have you covered. We've been around long enough and studied the marketing patterns to figure out the optimum number of emails after an event. So, if you have the participant list ready to go, use our 'quick create email campaign,' and the work will be done for you. We'll generate all of the personalized emails, schedule them, and have them all ready to go for the next two years.
Sales
If you look at a lot of the competitors on the market, you may ask yourself if user interfaces matter. The photos will speak for themselves right? That's wrong. We've seen an increasing number of competitors over the years, take shortcuts on their user interface, not only leading to decreasing sales but even allowing tech-savvy customers to download their photos for free.
We've changed the Flashframe interface over a dozen times to minimize the number of clicks to purchase a photo, increasing the overall number of participants that sitewide purchase photos. Any small confusion or frustration can lead to a person not downloading their photos, so make sure you go with a solution tailored for sports photography. We also handle all sales tax compliance, physical print fulfillment, and credit card processing through our partner Stripe--you'll just get a direct deposit after each sale.
Flashframe was tailor-made for sports photography and we've been working hard to ensure that the workflow is as easy as possible to keep you focused on the events, and not distracted by anything else. Feel free to reach out to our support team if you have any questions