Running the competition
Here are some notes on the entire process of running the competition
Explain the competition and get the images
You’ll need to explain the format of the competition if it’s new to your club. Would suggest that prior to this you pick a dozen or so images, and run a pretend competition with you self. A few runs through will really help to clarify it and let you know how to best explain it to your members.
The primary aim is that this is fun - it was created to do after our AGM. AGMs can ‘dry’ club evenings.
Images need to JPGs, ideally around 1400 by 1050 pixels. Filenames should photography name followed by title Separated by _ (underscore) or - (dash) or % (percent)
Image preparation
Worth making sure that the images don’t have titles or names on them - large borders don’t work so well either. Place all the images in the same directory.
Run the competition yourself
When you’ve got the images, it is worth running the competition youself. This is quite quick - you can just pick random winners - but does let you check each image is correct and the filenames are right.
Start the software
Start the software by double clicking on the icon; the first window lets you to
- click a button to select the directory that the images are in
- an overall title for the competition eg “AGM Fun Competition”
- click a button to load the images. This will check the titles of images as well.
- finally click the ‘run competition’ button
Running the competition
After clicking run, the software goes ‘full-screen’, no menus etc. The controls here are either
- press ‘s’ to start each round
- use the right and left arrow keys to advance from image one, to image two, to the both images displayed together
- press 1 or 2 to choose the winner
After choosing a winner, the next set of images are automatically displayed.
Choosing the winner
We’ve typically done this by asking members for a show of hands, for image 1 or image 2. We usually ask a couple of people to do the counting, one for each side of the hall.
A quick way is to make sure you know the number of people in the hall, then assuming no body abstains, then as soon as you get the first count, you know if it has won or not.