Guides

Sports photo captioning software

Type a jersey number, get the player's name and a wire-style caption. Built for sports photographers, team photographers and athletic communications staff.

Captioning a game by hand means looking up rosters, typing names, checking spellings and writing the same sentence hundreds of times. Metadata Express does the repetitive part for you: you type 23 and Enter, and the photo gets Marcus Hale as a keyword, in IPTC's “Person shown” field and in a complete caption.

What a caption looks like

You set up the game once (matchup, venue, date, photographer). Every tagged photo then gets a caption in the format wire services and team sites use:

Marcus Hale of the Riverside Hawks during the Riverside Hawks vs. Lakeview Tigers game at Hawks Stadium on March 14, 2026 in Riverside, California. (Photo by Jane Shooter)

Want to describe the moment? Press ? and type “celebrates a touchdown”, and it becomes “Marcus Hale of the Riverside Hawks celebrates a touchdown during…”. > adds the standard caption instantly, and < reuses the last one with this photo's players.

How captioning works

1. Load your roster: a simple text file with a number and a name per line, made in Notepad, TextEdit or Excel, or imported from a team's roster page. How to make one.
2. Fill in the session: event, date, location, photographer, and your IPTC template (byline, credit, copyright, source).
3. Tag each photo: type a jersey number and Enter for each player in the frame, then + to save and move on. Tagging both teams? Load both rosters and each player gets their own team in the caption.
4. Send them: the names and captions are written into the files (and into .xmp sidecars for RAW), so Lightroom, Photoshop, Bridge and photo desks read them straight away.

Built for game speed

• Works with JPEGs and RAW files (Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm and more), on Mac and Windows.
• Names stay exactly right: they come from your roster, so the spelling matches what athletes and photo platforms expect.
• Review Untagged finds every photo you skipped, and a thumbnail grid lets you mark crowd and scenery shots in one go.
• Optional AI Suggest proposes players for you to accept or ignore. It runs on your computer, is off by default, and there's a Non AI version if your clients don't allow AI tools.
• Name your files too: rename photos with their players, original name and date as you save (see renaming photos with player names).

Questions

Does it write standard IPTC metadata?

Yes. Captions go in the IPTC description, players in keywords and “Person shown”, plus byline, credit, copyright, source, headline, location and job ID from your template. Any software that reads IPTC (Lightroom, Photoshop, Bridge, photo desks) sees them.

Does it work with RAW files?

Yes. RAW files get their metadata in an .xmp sidecar next to them, the way Lightroom expects, and a RAW+JPEG pair is tagged together.

Do I need AI to use it?

No. Tagging and captions work by looking up the number you type in your own roster. AI Suggest is optional and off by default, and there is a Non AI version.

Is it on Windows?

Yes, Metadata Express runs on Mac and Windows, with the same features on both.

How much does it cost?

Every feature is free for 14 days. After that it's a monthly or yearly subscription, and students can apply for an educational discount.

Try it free

Metadata Express runs on Mac and Windows. Every feature is free for 14 days, no card needed. Download it here. Questions? Send us a message.

More guides: Sports photo captioning · Label video clips by player · Rename photos with player names · Tag by jersey number · IPTC metadata explained