Archiving Portland Timbers & Thorns

The Portland Timbers and Thorns are two professional soccer teams based in Portland, Oregon. The Timbers compete in Major League Soccer (MLS) while the Thorns participate in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). When they decided to switch from their previous digital asset manager, they needed to migrate their extensive media library rich with IPTC metadata to their new ScorePlay platform. What good is a media hub if you can’t have your full digital archive accessible and searchable? Thankfully, we’re archive experts.

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Portland archive chronicles

The Portland Archive Case Study explores the process that ScorePlay used to migrate and classify the extensive media assets that were sitting in Portland’s PhotoShelter account. Throughout PTFC’s history, club photographer Craig Mitchelldyer manually tagged players and events in the metadata using IPTC keyword tags. This metadata is helpful both internally and externally when assets circulate. Previously applied metadata can also supercharge the archiving process when moving over to another tool.

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To start, ScorePlay used their customer archiving software that matched the correct categories (such as match, training, merch etc.) to equivalent parent folders from PhotoShelter. The program auto-creates events with the correct names and dates, with calendar integration ensuring that additional metadata such as venue, opponent, and league or competition is added. Sub-galleries are converted into ScorePlay tags, and any IPTC metadata is read and created as tags: ScorePlay mimics the structure from the archive and adds additional information. All of the above ensures users will have a revolutionary way of searching, with an AI-powered search engine based on the existing archive structure.

In just one week, ScorePlay was able to ingest and AI-tag 240,000 assets. They even went the extra mile to pull old rosters to ensure every athlete and partner were tagged so they could easily be searched. The Portland Archive Case Study showcases how ScorePlay's AI systems and logic can be used to easily migrate, merge, classify, and organise extensive media archives into a searchable library.

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Portland x ScorePlay

In addition to the archive process, the Timbers and Thorns both started using the ScorePlay platform and apps to centralise, classify and distribute their current content to athletes and partners faster than ever before. ScorePlay is an innovative AI-powered solution that is revolutionising the way sports organisations manage, classify, and distribute their digital assets. By utilising ScorePlay, sports organisations can easily and effectively manage their digital assets, allowing them to tell their stories and upgrade their digital strategies.

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These tasks need to be consolidated on a single platform for a seamless real-time experience. The sports media landscape has relied on a variety of tools that crowd creative teams for too long (from PhotoShelter, Dropbox or Newsbridge for storage, and Greenfly for distribution). The new generation of sports fans demand social-media-ready content in real-time as they consume, and having an all-in-one solution allows sports organisations to be reactive, versatile and adept in their content strategy. Storytelling simplified, collaborative photo and video sharing made easy.

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