Title basically. I've found myself playing youth sports team photographer, which I don't mind doing but we're going to have two kids in little league this season and I'm not looking forward to culling two team's worth of games. I've gotten better at framing and catching fielding action over the past year, I get pictures of my own kids, and the rest of the parents on the team seem to appreciate the photos, so woo. But! I'm very interested in tips to make the process of culling shots a bit faster.
Each game I try to get a hero shot per kid batting (getting a hit, bonus points if the ball is in frame), along with some general fielding shots. I come home with a metric crap ton of photos since getting a hero shot basically means bursting any time our team is at bat for every pitch.
I try to make sure each kid has roughly equal representation in the final album, regardless of how many (or few) hits each kid actually got.
I've found that it's easiest to sort photos by kid and cull from there, but I'm doing this completely manually in photo mechanic. I've dabbled in AI tools, but I don't really know what's out there. It seems like sorting all the photos with the most prominent face in the frame, and using context of being mid burst if a face is lost, automatically would be a massive time savings. Does such software exist? I don't want to pull out every face in the frame, just the biggest/sharpest one. Is there a better option for youth sports? A better approach to apply in photo mechanic?
Any/all advice welcome!