AI Captioning for Sports Photography

Sideline ships newsroom-ready presets including AP, Getty, Imagn, Icon Sportswire, and ZUMA Press — and you can build and save your own caption styles to match your outlet or house style.

Sideline connects to your Photo Mechanic code replacements text file, so it already knows the rosters of the teams you're shooting. As soon as new images land in your watch folder, it reads jersey numbers, identifies teams by jersey color, distinguishes duplicate numbers, and writes professional captions automatically.

Sideline runs quietly in the background, captioning every image as it hits your ingest folder. Since Sideline uses JPG previews ~0.25MB in size (even with RAW files), the average image takes ~2.5 seconds to caption.

Yes. Set Sideline to watch your ingest folder and it writes captions straight to every file's metadata. Sideline writes captions to industry-standard IPTC metadata, so it works with Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, or any editor you already use.

Absolutely. Sideline understands 14 popular sports out of the box, including cricket, tennis, and horse racing, and you can feed it as many rosters as you need — perfect for athletic departments, freelancers, and wire shooters covering multiple teams.

Of course. Captions are written directly to IPTC metadata, so you can review or fine-tune them in Sideline, Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, or any editor you already use — Sideline simply does the heavy lifting for you.

No. Sideline is a complete captioning pipeline on its own. It watches your ingest folder, identifies players from roster data, and writes captions straight into each file's IPTC metadata — stamped and ready to publish. Photo Mechanic is optional, not required. Many photographers have cut PM out of their workflow and let Sideline handle captioning end to end. Don't have a code file yet? Sideline Rosters can build one in seconds.

Yes. Sideline works with both RAW and JPEG files. For RAWs, it uses the embedded JPEG preview for fast AI processing — so you get quick captions without waiting on full RAW conversion.

Yes. If your camera records voice memos or in-camera audio, Sideline can use that audio for added context when identifying players and writing captions — especially helpful when jersey numbers aren't visible.

Caption Review is an in-app panel where you can browse, edit, and re-caption images before they leave your machine. It's the fastest way to spot-check AI output on a big assignment without opening every file in Photo Mechanic.