Camera Labs

Hi all

A quick hello, as I have just joined.
I'm Patrick, 22 from Oxford.
I had an interest in photography as a kid and used an Nikon film SLR and had various lenses and filters ect, I was and still am quite clueless about photography but am keen to learn and practice with my new D40 I got for xmas. Anyway...

At my work we would like to run a photo competition over the next year. The plan would be, select 12 subjects and invite members of staff to upload their photos onto a web hosting site set up for the comp. This is easy enough, but ideally we would like to find a way for other members of staff to vote on which photo they like the most for each month?
Anyone got any ideas??

Cheers
Pat

Hi pat_986,

and first of all: a warm welcome to the forum. And congratz on the D40. I have a D40 as well and I'm very happy with it, so I'm sure it will serve you well.

As for your question:
I'm not aware that any of the usual photo-hosting sites that allows you to not only vote, but also control who gets to vote. (I'm inferring that you want to control who can vote as well).

As such, a forum not unlike this one, might be your best option. Perhaps many of your voters already have either a flickr or photobucket account, and it's easy to post pictures directly from there to a forum like this one.

If you head over to the "On Assignment" section and look at the monthly assignments, you can see how it works. It also tallies the votes and shows them in a bar graph.

I think that Gordon is in a better position to tell you the forum-software version he is using for it all.

However, you do have to host the forum somewhere.

Without being completely sure, I would guess that some of the free blog-sites allows you something similar - it would be worth checking out.

Good luck in your search!

Cheers

Great,Thanks.
I did consider a forum, but don't want all the hassel of setting it up.
Thanks for the advice

Hi Pat, I agree it would seem a bit excessive to set up a forum just so you could have a hosting and voting acility, but setting up phpbb really is rpetty quick and simple - and it's also free, although you'll want to add a MOD to discourage automatic spambots from registering. I find the VIP MOD is very effective.

Thanks Gordon, I think I will spend some time looking into that.
Nothing is ever simple is it!