Managing Large Competitions

If you have a competition with hundreds or thousands of entries, you will find it much easier to break up the process of judging into smaller image groups and share the judging task with a larger group of judges.

Public Competitions

If you are creating a competition that will be open to the public and not just to your members, you should create a separate website for this purpose. Your special website would be configured to automatically grant membership to any user that desires an account. This is configured on the Manage Organization Profile page.

In order for people to upload images, they must have a Visual Pursuits account. This account will link the person to their image submissions. If a person already has an account with any other Visual Pursuits organization, that same account must be used with all other organizations, including your special competition site.

A special subscription is required for your public competition website. The subscription is based on the number of images instead of membership. The practical way to judge is using the website judging feature, which requires a premium subscription. You might need a 2000 or 3000 images/year subscription. Look for the image counts on our subscription page.

Inter-Club Competitions

If all of your image submissions will come from other organizations, you can choose to use an existing organization to host the competition. The submitting organizations are called "member organizations". The parent organization holding the competition is usually a council or regional group.

Image submissions usually come from competition held by member organizations, not directly from the members in those organizations. Each member organization holds a competition to collect and accept images. A Competition Manager in each member organization selects images from that competition to submit to the parent competition. Please see the video on "Submitting Images to Another Organization".

There is also an option on a competition to invite other organizations to submit images into your competition. The submissions may be made by individual members or from competition hosted by the guest organization. These organizations are called 'Guest" organizations.

It is also possible to receive submissions from member or guest organizations that do not have a normal Visual Pursuits subscription. Please see the video on "Submit Images to a Another Organization using a Free Account".

Organizing Your Competition

You should use the normal Competition Groups structure to hold your competitions. Use a group for each year. If you have multiple competition dates within a year, create a subgroup for each competition date or month.

You will probably have multiple competitions on your competition date for different categories of images, such as "Open", "Nature", "Travel", etc. Create a separate subgroup for each of your competitions, since each competition will need to consist of multiple competitions during the judging process.

Each of your competitions will be handled the same way. Images are all submitted by the public to each of your public competitions. When a competition is closed, the images are allocated to multiple "acceptance competitions" that are hidden from the public. One or more judges can be assigned to each of the "acceptance competitions". Judges select images "accepted" into the final judging round. The "accepted" images are usually judged by a panel and awards are granted.

Note that the judges that are selecting images for the final judging round do not need to be the same judges that judge the final judging round. You should spread the task of judging to avoid fatigue. Scores assigned in the acceptance process do not need to be passed to the final judging round.

If you have a truly huge judging task, you can obviously create tiers in the judging process.

Splitting a Competition Into Sub-Competitions

Once your competition is closed to new entries you can begin the judging process. The first task is to move the competition entries into several "acceptance competitions" for the initial judging pass. You want to break the competition into nearly equal parts with each part having a manageable number of images to judge.

Splitting the competition into pieces requires the use of the "Split" button on the competition, accessed via one of the Manage Competition pages. The "Split" button only appears in competitions with more than 100 entries that are closed, have not been judged, and are not open for voting.

The Split action will report the number of images in the entire competition and ask how many "acceptance competitions" should be created. The new competitions will be created with nearly identical characteristics of the original competition. Images will be moved from the original competition into the "acceptance competitions".

The new competitions will have the Award Set "*Acceptance Only" assigned, allowing only the one award for the images. This system define Award Set does not place a limit on the number of awards to grant. You would need to create a custom Award Set to automatically limit the awards and assign that set to each "acceptance competition" instead of the default.

Important: You must not alter the Competition Titles of the split out competitions or move them into another group. The titles and group are used to assist in merging the images back into the original competition.

You will then need to assign judges to each of the "acceptance competitions" in the usual manner. Use the Judges button for each of the competitions.

Judging the Acceptance Competitions

The acceptance competitions should be judged in a manner similar to any other competition. The judge should assign scores to images as the images are reviewed in full screen mode. The thumbnails should be sorted by score and Acceptance awards should be granted to the highest scoring images.

Assigning awards to a large number of images via the website can be a bit slow. Using the Image Competition Manager (ICM) program would be faster, but that would require making the judges Competition Managers, a practice that is not recommended.

If an acceptance competition is assigned to multiple judges, all of the judges must complete their scoring and ranking before awards can be assigned. Awards can be assigned by a judge or a Competition Manager.

Final Judging Round

To complete the final judging round you need to submit the images with Acceptance awards back to the original competition for final judging. Use the "Collect" button on the original competition to move the accepted images back into the original competition.

Once the images are in the competition for your final judging, this competition can have several judges assigned and the judging process can be performed in a normal manner. The goal is to have a manageable number of images in this final group.