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.
The number is read by finding the largest number in the frame, which on a bib is the number itself, and taking the first run of one to four digits.
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 classification.
- Orange "Tag bib" — nothing readable was found. Tap the slot and type it.
This distinction matters. A perfectly sharp photo of the wrong runner's bib produces a confident read 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 frame wins. If a neighboring runner's bib is closer to the camera, or larger in frame, it can be the one that gets read. This is the most common bad read. Frame 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.
Recapturing is safe. If you retake a slot, the old read cannot land on the new photo. The slot resets while the new read is in flight, so you never see a stale 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 a reference to it travels with 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 inline underneath the bib field in the correction form.
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 blocks you. The upload is best-effort and runs behind your work. If the connection is slow or drops, the bib is still recorded and broadcast on time; only the photo reference is missing, and it catches up on a later update. Capturing bibs on a weak signal is not a problem.
What the photos are, and are not
- They are validation aids, not records. The official record is the time and the athlete. The photograph exists to settle a question about identity.
- They expire after 30 days. Long enough to reconcile a meet and answer a protest, short enough that a season of photographs of children does not accumulate indefinitely. Do not treat them as an archive.
- They are private to the meet. Photos are stored privately and are readable only by devices authorized for 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 resolving themselves 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.