Designed for sports photographers on deadline, Sideline automatically captions your images—delivering fast, accurate, professional results before the final whistle.
Captions matter.
Publications need them. Your clients expect them.
But let's be honest: writing captions kinda sucks.
You know the feeling—stuck typing player names and play descriptions when you’d rather be shooting or editing. Imagine reclaiming that time for what actually matters: your creativity, your clients, and your business.
Sideline fixes that. It identifies players from your Photo Mechanic® rosters, understands the action, and produces professional captions in newsroom-standard formats like AP and Getty—automatically, instantly, and accurately.
Trusted by world-class photographers from
Learn how Sideline's AI helps you caption sports photos faster—saving you time, stress, and late nights.
Point Sideline to a code replacements text file so it understands players and teams. Don't have a code replacements text file? Sideline's Roster Manager can create one for you.✨
Every caption matches the style your publication expects. Whether you need AP, Getty, or Imagn, Sideline delivers captions that are ready to publish instantly.
See how Sideline's AI captioning can save you time, energy, and frustration every game.
Stop wasting time manually writing captions. Sideline watches your ingest folder and automatically generates professional captions in the background for every image as they're ingested.
Configure once, then let Sideline handle the rest. Captions are written directly to your images' metadata, so they're ready when you import into your image editing software.
When every minute counts, Sideline ensures you never miss a deadline. Images are captioned in seconds, giving you more time to shoot, edit, and upload.
Sideline is 12x faster than manual captioning – reducing captioning time from
30 seconds per image
to just
~2.5 seconds per image.
You'll save time every game and deliver results faster.
Sideline Captions
"Sideline cut my postgame workflow from two hours to 20 minutes. I used to dread captioning, but now I just have Sideline do it for me. My clients think I hired an assistant."
Michael K.
Freelance Sports Photographer
From player recognition to publish-ready metadata, Sideline includes everything you need to fully automate your captioning workflow.
Sideline Captions offers keyboard shortcuts for every key feature. You can map these commands to your TourBox buttons for an even faster, more intuitive photo editing and captioning experience.
Keep every team you photograph ready to go.
Sideline's Roster Manager organizes every roster for the teams you photograph the most.
Caption Review gives you full control to check, edit, and approve every caption faster than ever - no need to go back into Photo Mechanic.
Deliver photos to your clients instantly with beautiful, password-protected galleries - no FTP server configuration needed.
All the power of Sideline Captions, coming to Windows - the same intelligent AI captioning you know and love.
Covering live events
Handling multiple sports
Who need to deliver on deadline
Who needs faster captioning
Start for free and choose the plan that works for you.
Get 500 AI-generated captions for free.
No credit card required
Choose the plan that's right for you.
Prefer a one-time payment instead of a subscription? We've got you covered.
Sideline delivers newsroom-standard captions out of the box, including AP, Getty, and Imagn styles—so every frame is ready for the publications and wire services you work with most.
Sideline connects to your code replacements text file, so it already knows the rosters of the teams you're shooting. As soon as new images land in your watch folder, it matches images against those names, understands the play, and writes professional captions automatically.
Sideline runs quietly in the background, captioning every image as it hits your ingest folder. Since Sideline uses JPG previews ~0.25MB in size (even with RAW files), the average image takes ~2.5 seconds to caption.
Yes. Set Sideline to watch your ingest folder and it writes captions straight to every file’s metadata. Sideline writes captions to industry-standard IPTC metadata files, so it can be used with any editing software you already use.
Yes. Sideline's Roster Manager can generate entire rosters from ESPN, MaxPreps, and NCAA Stats. Have multiple photographers? You can easily export rosters to to share with your team.
Absolutely. Sideline understands eleven popular sports out of the box – with more coming soon – and you can feed it as many rosters as you need—perfect for athletic departments, freelancers, and wire shooters covering multiple teams.
Sideline’s FTP mode watches a remote FTP server. When new images are added, Sideline downloads and captions them automatically, so when you come in from halftime, your images are ready to edit and publish.
Of course. Captions are written directly to the IPTC metadata, so you can review or fine-tune them directly within Sideline, Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, or any editor you already use—Sideline simply does the heavy lifting for you.
Sideline's free trial gives you 500 AI-generated captions – no credit card required. It’s the fastest way to see Sideline in action on a real assignment before upgrading to lifetime access. For a full list of features available in a free trial, see the pricing section.
Yes, Sideline is subscription-based software. However, we do offer a lifetime license for $249 for those who prefer to buy the software once and own it forever.
Sideline Captions requires macOS 14.0+. While it can work independently, it is designed to be used in conjunction with Photo Mechanic software for the best experience.
Sideline is macOS only for now, but we are actively working on a version of Sideline for Windows. We hope to release it in early 2026.
See why savvy sports photographers are switching to automated captioning. Download Sideline Captions and deliver professional results in minutes.