SUBMITTING IMAGES
Our Club conducts a regular monthly competition in several grades and members can upload their images to our online gallery allowing them to be judged. Each image submitted attracts an entry fee of $1.00 payable at our monthly meetings or other methods by prior arrangement. Uploaded images can't be viewed by anyone other than judges and administrators until judging has been completed. Once judging has been completed, the respective image albums are opened allowing all members to view all the images for that particular competition. You should be familiar with the Competition Rules before submitting images, and if you are in doubt as to which grade you should submit your images to, some guidelines can be found in the Which Grade? section.
The system does not automatically limit the number of images you can submit however the competition rules state that no more than three images be submitted in each category for any month. This gives a possible total of six images ... three in the "open" competition and three in the "set subject" competition. Submissions are generally final which means that you can't alter or substitute your submitted images except in special circumstances.
The on-line gallery system allows a maximum file size of 256KB per image and image files that are any larger than this will be rejected automatically. See the "Resizing Images" section if you need help preparing your picture. Each registered member has been allocated 50MB of disk storage ... enough for about 200 images of the maximum size of 256KB.
The size of the images you can upload is limited to 1024 pixels in width and/or 768 pixels in height. If your image is in "Landscape" format (wider than it is high) then it must not be any wider than 1024 pixels. If your image is in "Portrait" format (higher than it is wide) then the height must be no greater than 768 pixels. All images must be in .jpg format. The system will reject any file that does not have a .jpg file extension.
Remember that 1024 x 768 means width x height. A common mistake is to make a portrait format image 768 pixels wide and 1024 pixels high. That would be 768 x 1024 ... and it would be rejected by the system as the height of 1024 pixels exceeds the allowable maximum of 768 pixels. Also you should make sure that your image is the right way up ... the system will not automatically rotate images so if for example you upload a portrait format image on its side, that's how it will appear.
It is suggested that you size your pictures to take full advantage of the maximum allowed image size of 1024 pixels in width and/or 768 pixels in height. If you upload images that are substantially smaller they will appear small when projected at club meetings and will appear small compared to other images when viewed at full size on the web site.
After preparing your image(s) for uploading, browse to the Competition Gallery by clicking the "Competition Gallery" menu button on the "Galleries" page of this web site. This will open a new browser window. If you are not already logged in, click on the "Login" tab and enter your username and password.
Do NOT upload images on behalf of other members using your username as this will cause a lot of confusion. The system uses the login username to identify who the images belong to. If you need to upload images on behalf of other members you MUST log in using their username and password.
Once you are logged in, click on the "Upload File" tab at the top of the page.
The first line of information on the upload page is "Album". Here you should select the appropriate album for the grade you are entering. This is where most mistakes are made! ... you MUST make sure that the correct album is displayed in this field before you upload the image. Use the down arrow on the right side of the album description to display all the albums, then click on the appropriate album name in the displayed list.
As an example, if you are submitting your image in C Grade for June 2008, choose the (Open Competition C Grade) June 2008 C Grade album. It is the responsibility of users to ensure that images are uploaded to the correct album. If for example an image intended for B Grade is uploaded to an A Grade album it will be judged in A Grade.
Next, click the "Browse" button to the right of the "File" entry line and locate the picture file you prepared for uploading, select that image by double clicking the filename.
There are two further lines of information. The first of these is "File title". Here you should type in the title of your picture. Simply enter a plain text title for your image such as "Red Flowers" or "Beach Scene" etc. (without the quotes). You must enter a title for your image ... you will be prompted if you attempt to upload a picture with a blank title entry. Please do NOT include any identifying information in the title ... such as your name or membership number. Note that the system will automatically strip out any punctuation symbols in the title such as quotation marks, commas and apostrophes.
The next entry field is "File description". This can contain some details about your image but it should be left blank in the case of competition entries as anything you type may cause confusion or influence judges in unexpected ways!. If you are uploading an image to the "Rogues Gallery" or "Introduce yourself" gallery then you should use this field to enter your details.
Once you have entered the required information double check the entries ... in particular, check that the appropriate album is displayed in the album field. Next, click the "Upload file" button to start the upload. Be patient! It can take a few minutes to upload the image depending on the speed of your Internet connection and the size of the file. Eventually you should see a message indicating that the image has been uploaded and then the "My Entries" page will automatically be displayed so that you can check your entry. If you are uploading to non-competition albums you will see your image displayed in full once uploading has completed.
If you have further images to upload, simply repeat the process by again clicking the "Upload file" tab at the top of the page ... but make sure that you re-select the correct album as the system will default to the first album in the list, not the last one you uploaded to!.
You can check to see what images you currently have in the system at any time by clicking the "My Entries" button at the top of the page in the image galleries.
There is a "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) tab on the gallery page and this can be used to answer many questions associated with using the online gallery. If you are completely stuck then you can use the contact form to send an email message to the site administrators. We will do our best to help you out.
FORSTER DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY CLUB
