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Recognition: numbers

Read jersey, bib, car, sail, saddle and bike numbers.

Faces tell you who; numbers tell you which competitor. With number detection on, SnapFlow reads the visible numbers in your photos — jersey, bib, car, sail, saddle and bike numbers — and groups every shot of each competitor by their number. Combined with faces, you can hand athlete #23 a gallery of just their own shots.

Turn it on

On the album's Edit → Workflows page, under People detection, switch on Read numbers (jersey, bib, car, sail, saddle, bike). SnapFlow then OCRs each photo as it's ingested. Web

Action shots can be hard to read

Numbers only read when they're visible and reasonably sharp — a number that's motion-blurred, turned away or cropped out won't be caught. That's normal; correct or add them by hand using the tools below.

On the People page

The album People page where detected numbers and clusters appear

Detected numbers appear as their own cards on the People page, grouped by type — Jersey #, Car #, Bib #, and so on. Where two opposing teams wear the same number, livery-colour chips split them apart. Click a card to open the number's detail page.

Correcting and assigning

Each number's detail page gives you everything you need:

  • Fix number — if OCR read 8 as 3, correct it once and SnapFlow re-matches every affected photo.
  • Set team — pin the number to a team, overriding the auto-detected one.
  • Link to athlete / face cluster — connect the number to a person, so the number and the face describe the same athlete.
  • Add co-people — for shared numbers (a sailboat crew, co-drivers, a relay), attach everyone who belongs to it.
  • Ignore — drop numbers you don't want (a safety car, a medical bike).
  • Per photo: Reassign a misgrouped shot or Remove it from the number.
  • Download all (ZIP) — grab every shot of that competitor in one click.

You usually don't have to connect faces and numbers one by one. The Auto-link faces to numbers action on the People page does it for you: where a face cluster consistently appears in the same photos as a number, SnapFlow binds them together. It's deliberately conservative — it only links when the overlap is strong — so you can trust the result and clean up the rest by hand.

Faces + numbers = the full picture

A face follows someone across events; a number identifies them within an event. Linking the two means searching either one finds all their photos — and team galleries, captions and tags all fall into place.

Also in the desktop app

The desktop app's identifier cards carry the same Fix # and Set team controls. Desktop app

Next: grouping competitors by their team kit.