Entering bibs by hand is the slowest part of most finish crews' job, and the part most likely to go wrong under pressure. Bib photo capture replaces the typing with pointing: photograph each athlete, and the number is read off the bib for you.
The photo is not thrown away afterward. It rides along with the result, so when a bib and an athlete do not line up, the record keeper has a picture of who actually crossed rather than a number nobody can account for.
Not the same thing as photo finish. Photo finish is a line-scan camera that produces times. This feature photographs bib numbers for identity. They are separate tools, run by different people, and you can use either, both, or neither.
Where you will find it
Scan Bibs appears wherever several bibs get entered in a row:
| Position | What the slots are | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Starting line, lane setup | One per lane | Before the gun, assigning athletes to lanes |
| Pack recorder | One per crossing | After the finish, attaching bibs to places |
| Finish timer (per lane) | Just your lane | At your lane, if the start line did not pre-scan it |
| Standalone stopwatch | One per lane | Offline, with no meet running |
Individual rows also carry their own button, so you can photograph a single lane or place without opening the full grid.
How capturing works
- Tap an empty slot. The photo fires instantly. It does not wait for the camera to lock onto a number, because waiting is exactly what makes bib scanning slow.
- The number is read in the background. While reading, the slot shows "Reading…". You do not have to wait for it before photographing the next athlete.
- The grid advances on its own to the next slot that still needs a bib, keeping it centered so you can work down a chute without scrolling.
- Tap a slot you already captured to review the photo, correct the number on a keypad pre-filled with what was read, or retake it.
It works by picking out the biggest number in the picture, which on a bib is the bib number itself, and taking the first one to four digits of it.
What the colors mean
The bib in a slot is colored by whether it matches your roster, not by whether the camera read it confidently:
- Green. The bib matches an athlete on your roster whose gender and age group fit this heat.
- Red. The bib is unknown, or it belongs to someone who does not fit this heat's gender or age group.
- Orange "Tag bib". Nothing readable was found. Tap the slot and type it.
That difference is the useful part. A perfectly sharp photo of the wrong runner's bib gives you a clean, confident number and a red slot. Trust the color, not the fact that a number appeared.
What can go wrong, and what to watch
The biggest number in the picture wins. If a neighboring runner's bib is closer to the camera, or just bigger in the shot, it can be the one that gets read. This is the most common bad read. Line up the athlete you mean, and glance at the color.
A bib that is folded, twisted, or turned away will not read. Tag it by hand and move on. Do not spend a heat's worth of time trying to get a photo that reads cleanly.
Retaking is safe. If you retake a slot, the number from the old photo cannot land on the new one. The slot clears while the new photo is being read, so you never see an old number sitting under a fresh picture.
The photo goes to the record keeper
Each photo uploads in the background as soon as it is taken, and it stays attached to the lane assignment or the result. The record keeper can then open the photo from any row: on the live heat, on the results list, and right underneath the bib field when they are correcting a result.
This is what the feature is really for. Some cases it solves:
- A bib and an athlete disagree. The record keeper opens the photo and sees which one the runner was actually wearing.
- An athlete never pinned their bib on. The crossing is recorded with no number, but there is a photograph of the person. Someone who knows the athletes can identify them after the meet instead of the time being written off.
- Two results claim the same bib. The photos say which row is the misread.
- A parent questions a result. There is a picture, not an argument.
Uploading never holds you up. The upload happens quietly behind your work. If the connection is slow or drops, the bib is still recorded and sent out on time; only the photo is missing for a while, and it catches up on its own. Capturing bibs on a weak signal is not a problem.
What the photos are, and are not
- They are there to settle questions, not to be the record. The official record is the time and the athlete. The photograph exists to answer "who was that?"
- They expire after 30 days. Long enough to sort out a meet and answer a protest, short enough that a season of photographs of children does not pile up forever. They are not an archive.
- They are private to the meet. Photos are stored privately and can only be opened by devices that joined that meet. They never appear on your public results page.
If you have a helper at the chute
The strongest use of this feature is a second person doing nothing but photographing finishers while the timing operator keeps timing. In a pack heat that means one person tapping crossings, one person walking the chute with the camera, and bibs filling themselves in as the photos come in. It is the difference between a chute that backs up and one that does not.
Did this answer your question? If something here is wrong, missing, or out of date, tell us at support@finishlinetimer.com and we’ll fix it.