How to tag race photos by bib number — automatically

Bib tagging thousands of race photos by hand takes hours. Here's how TagMyRun reads the bib numbers for you and writes them into your images — searchable everywhere, in minutes.

·4 min read

Every race photographer knows the bottleneck. Shooting the event is the fun part. The bib tagging afterwards — opening thousands of frames and noting who's who by race number — is the part that eats your evening.

And that tagging is exactly what turns a folder of photos into sales. A runner searches for "247," finds their shots, buys them. No tags, no sale. But doing it by hand doesn't scale past a few hundred images.

Let the computer read the bibs

A bib number is made to be read — large, high-contrast, printed on every runner's chest. TagMyRun uses AI vision to read them the way it would read a licence plate, then does the tedious tagging for you.

You point it at a folder of race photos and it gets to work:

Point TagMyRun at a folder and start the analysis — it reads every photo automatically.

A few minutes later, every photo has its bib numbers detected, laid out so you can scan the whole set at a glance:

Bib tagging in action — each photo tagged with the runner's number, ready to review.

You get a quick review pass to fix the occasional tricky one — a bib that's folded, blurred, or half-hidden — then TagMyRun writes the numbers into the photos and, if you like, exports a spreadsheet.

Thousands of photos in minutes, not hours

This is the difference that matters at scale. A folder that would take you a whole evening to tag by hand is done in the time it takes to make a coffee.

A full folder tagged and searchable by bib number — in minutes, not hours.

The tags live inside the photo

Here's the part photographers love: the bib numbers go into each photo's metadata — the standard IPTC and XMP fields — not into a separate app you have to keep open.

So the tags travel with the file. Import into Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, or your gallery platform and everything is already searchable by bib number. Upload to your sales site and buyers find themselves instantly. Your originals are only ever touched when you choose to write.

We read bibs, not faces. A bib is an identifier the runner chose to wear by signing up — public and disposable, exactly as a race number should be. We deliberately avoid face recognition. Here's why we read bibs, not faces.

Try it free on your next race

There's no account to set up, and nothing to install unless you want it:

Either way you start with 500 free credits — one credit tags one photo — so you can run a real folder before paying anything. After that it's roughly a penny a photo.

Point TagMyRun at your last event and watch a night's worth of bib tagging happen in minutes — then let more runners find, and buy, their photos.

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