Built by a photographer, for photographers

Crawford Ifland is an award-winning sports photographer who primarily covers college sports. He built Sideline for working photographers who want to streamline their workflow and reduce stress: freelancers, wire-service photographers, athletic department photographers, or anyone transmitting on deadline. The goal is simple — spend more time shooting and less time at your laptop.

Sideline is a macOS app that reads jersey numbers, matches them to your rosters, and writes newsroom-standard captions into IPTC metadata so you can approve and transmit. It's a photographer's tool, built by a working photographer.

Why I built Sideline

I distinctly remember my first newspaper assignment. I was a sophomore in high school freelancing for my local paper. It was a Friday night and I was assigned to shoot the first football game of the season.

I didn't have a wireless hotspot, and the stadium was new so they hadn't wired it up with Internet yet. When I was done shooting, I had to run over to Starbucks to hop on their Wi-Fi, quickly caption my selects, and get them to my editor before the deadline.

The stress of having to type names one-by-one, double-checking that I had the right number for the right player, and to make sure I had them all in by my deadline... It was a frustrating experience, and I knew there had to be a better way.

Fast-forward to today – the technology has improved, but the bottleneck is still the same: typing names one-by-one. Code replacements in Photo Mechanic can help, but building roster files and captioning each image was still slow, tedious, and pulled me away from the action.

Nobody got into this craft to spend the night typing names next to numbers. I built Sideline so working photographers can caption and deliver faster than ever — and be the photographer that editors call first.

If you want the line we will not cross on AI and the photograph itself, read the Sideline Constitution.