Game photos — share shots from the stands.
Every game page on KidGOAT now has a Photos section. Parents who tracked the game can upload pictures from the sidelines — a celebration after a three, a kid mid-shot, the team huddle at the bench. The rest of the parents on the game see them in a carousel right above the box score.
What the new Game photos section looks like on /g/<gameKey>.
Who can upload
Only parents who tracked the game. If your name is in the per-kid stats table — meaning you tapped at least one stat for your kid during the game — you'll see a 📷 Add photos button at the top of the section.
Tap it, pick one or many shots from your phone, and they upload one at a time with progress shown inline. Each photo gets resized client-side before upload (longer side capped at 1600px), so a 7MB phone photo uploads as ~250KB. Cellular-friendly, doesn't burn your data.
Who can see them
Logged-in viewers only. We deliberately gate the photos behind a sign-in — game photos can show kids' faces, and we don't want a random visitor scrolling through years of game shots without an account.
The one exception is the auto-generated highlights blog posts. When we publish a recap of a game, we embed one or two photos at the top of the post (NBA-style hero image). Those are publicly viewable in the post — but you, the operator, control which games get a published post. Photos that haven't been picked for a recap stay private.
How the carousel works
- Desktop: 4-up grid above the box score.
- Mobile: horizontal scroll with snap — swipe through one photo at a time.
- Tap any photo to open it full-screen in a lightbox. Arrow keys (or on-screen ← →) to navigate.
- The parent who uploaded each photo is shown as a small caption ("Posted by Adam S.") so attribution is clear.
- You can delete your own photos from the lightbox (admin can delete any).
Storage
Photos are hosted on Cloudinary with their auto-format and auto-quality transforms turned on. That means each viewer gets the best modern format their browser supports (WebP, AVIF) at the right size for their screen. The carousel thumbnails ship at ~50–150KB each; full-res lightbox photos at ~300–600KB. Cheap to host, fast to load.
Why we built it
The point of KidGOAT has always been: every kid's basketball moments live in one place — stats, video clips, page URL — instead of scattered across group chats. Photos were the missing piece. A great rebound or a buzzer-beater dunk-attempt deserves more than a screenshot in a thread that gets pushed off the screen by tomorrow's homework reminder.
Now they live on the game page, alongside the play-by-play and the final score, where the team's parents can find them three weeks from now — not just in the thirty minutes after the buzzer.