While the most popular way to use PhotoDay’s private galleries and Capture app is for volume school photography, there are many ways to make Capture work for you! Even if you only want to use group and public galleries to sell, you can still use the Capture workflow to build composites in third-party programs such as Pixnub Sport Photo Automation (SPA).
This article will walk you through the steps of how PhotoDay can revolutionize your compositing workflow.
Before starting this process, first, be sure to…
Create a private gallery job
Photograph the subjects on picture day
Once the above is completed, follow the steps and corresponding videos below ⤵️
1. Upload, match, and feature photos in your private gallery job.
After culling, export your green screen (or extracted png files) images from your photo editor as small jpegs (640x480 is large enough for FaceFind to match).
Upload them to the private gallery job.
Wait for FaceFind to match all the images.
Select your team (or Memory Mate) individual images for each subject by selecting them as featured photos.
2. Export from PhotoDay
From within your job, click the Services tab then click Exports.
Click + to start a new export.
Name the export.
Select Subjects either by All or only with a reference photo.
Select a Group to organize them how you want them sorted in the CSV (like group by team). Click confirm.
Select Export Type > Compositing Data then click the blue Start Export button.
Download the completed export.
3. Create a SPA-Ready CSV
Create a SPA-ready spreadsheet using the TSV/CSV Starter feature in the Sports Photo Automator plugin panel in Photoshop (SPA). Check out Pixnub’s tutorials for a more in-depth look.
Or create this manually in the spreadsheet editor of your choice.
Select the text layer fields you need and the resize function.
Click the Create CSV button and save it to your job folder on your computer.
Open both the SPA CSV and the PhotoDay Composites Export CSV.
Do a Find and Replace on the file extension in the PD Export.
If your extractions are PNG and you uploaded JPG, then you need to change the file extension in the PhotoDay Export to PNG. It's easy and takes 3 seconds in any spreadsheet editor.Copy data for each column from PhotoDay Export CSV to the SPA CSV.
Save or Export the SPA doc as a CSV making sure to add the file type extension.
4. Set up your Templates with the correct layer names for this data
Make sure the layer names match the CSV column headers.
Use ALL CAPS.
For running individuals, add the player setup layer. Check out Pixnub’s tutorials for a more in-depth look.
Delete unused layers and save with the appended file name of “Filename__SPA.psd” so you don't overwrite the original template.
Load the CSV in the SPA Batch panel.
Run a batch.
5. Team or Memory Mate Featured Photo (Photo Mechanic process)
This is where a piece of software called Photo Mechanic works to manage your files at a finder or directory level using the PhotoDay export’s featured photo column.
Open Photo Mechanic (PM), find your job folder, and double-click on your extractions folder to create a Contact Sheet in PM.
In the PM Menu click Edit then Find. Make sure to have “Any of the Words” in the drop-down selected next to Search and File Names has a checkmark.
Copy the featured photo column for the players you want to move into a new folder and paste the file names into the Find box in PM. You should see a single column listed. Click Find.
Your images will highlight yellow, indicating that they are selected.
In the file navigator on the left side, right-click on the extractions folder and select New Folder inside this Folder from the flyout menu.
Name the new folder for the players being sorted.
Option Click one of the Yellow highlighted images and drag it to the new folder. That will create a copy of those highlighted images, leaving your main extractions intact.
Repeat for other teams or memory mate images that need to be in separate folders for EX Team Builder or SPA for your Memory Mate template.