Online photo site snapizzi has announced that its newly upgraded IZ tag technology was successfully used to provide a personalised photo gallery for each participant at the 2009 Vision 5K held at Boston College on June 7. Participants in the Vision 5K, a unique annual event featuring world-class blind and visually impaired athletes competing with sighted runners, each wore a bib imprinted with a small, customised IZ tag (essentially a barcode).  With the IZ tag technology, photos uploaded to the snapizzi website were automatically associated with that participant and sequenced.  In this way, the photographs of multiple photographers shooting from numerous positions were automatically merged into an instant private photo gallery for each individual participant.

Website: Vision 5K
Website: Snapizzi

snapizzi Press Release

snapizzi Enhances Photo Technology to Automatically Collate Various Photos of a Single Athlete from Multiple Photographers
Improved Tags Used to Provide Participant Photos for Boston’s Vision 5K

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. ? June 12, 2009 – Online photo site snapizzi, the one-stop shop for portrait and event photographers, today announced that its newly upgraded IZ tag™ technology was successfully used to provide a personalized photo gallery for each participant at the 2009 Vision 5K held at Boston College on June 7.

Participants in the Vision 5K each wore a runner bib imprinted with a small, customized IZ tag.  With the IZ tag technology, photos uploaded to the snapizzi website are automatically associated with that participant and sequenced.  In this way, the photographs of multiple photographers shooting from numerous positions are automatically merged into an instant private photo gallery for each individual participant.

snapizzi recently enhanced its IZ tags to give event, sports, school and portrait photographers even greater freedom and flexibility to do their work.  The upgraded IZ tags can now be read and decoded in photos at a size of only 100 by 100 pixels, allowing photographers to capture the tags inside each photograph regardless of file size.  In addition, the tagging enhancements include the ability to download IZ tags as JPEGs or GIFs and apply them to nametags, buttons, business cards, runners’ bibs, jerseys, bicycles, athletic equipment and just about anything else.

The tag enhancements proved to be essential to photographers at the Vision 5K.

“The ability to automatically collate photos of a specific runner, taken by five different photographers, in multiple locations throughout the route, is revolutionary and groundbreaking,” says snapizzi CEO Jesper Sondergaard, a veteran of Photodisc, Getty Images and Corbis.  “The industry standard for delivering these types of event photos used to be measured in weeks.  Now, with snapizzi, photographers can deliver results in a matter of hours.”

The Vision 5K is a unique annual event featuring world-class blind and visually impaired athletes competing with sighted participants.  More than 1,000 runners and walkers participated in this year’s event, and snapizzi was there to capture their photos before, during and after the race.

Photographers at the Vision 5K used snapizzi’s patent-pending IZ tags to automatically sort and categorize photos of individual runners and walkers from group shots – as well as still team photos – automatically creating personalized galleries for each participant.  Instead of searching through thousands of photos to find themselves, the Vision 5K athletes simply visited the snapizzi website and entered their IZ tag numbers to display a private gallery of the photos in which they appeared.

“Thanks to snapizzi, high-quality photos of Vision 5K participants were available and ready for purchase in personalized galleries on the event website,” said Norman Lang, Chair of the Leadership Team for the Vision 5K.  “More importantly, snapizzi has been a gracious business partner, donating half of the proceeds generated from the event to further our mission in raising awareness of, and supporting the programs for, the blind and visually impaired.  We look forward to continuing a mutually beneficial relationship.”

The new technology has also proven beneficial to school photographers, who can expedite the process of taking hundreds of student photos by simply integrating IZ tags into the bottom of photos.

Image source: vision5k.org

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