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Creating a contest

A contest is a one-off photography competition organized by an association, with categories, jury and awards. Unlike a league, a contest does not have monthly themes — participants submit their photos during the registration period.

Step 1 — Access the creation flow

Go to My associations → ⚙️ gear icon → Create contest.

Step 2 — General information

  • Name — contest name (e.g. Spring Contest 2026)
  • Contest number — optional, in case your association numbers its contests (maximum 12 characters). Not to be confused with the number each sponsor assigns to the contest, which is set in the Sponsors tab.
  • Description — free-form text explaining the contest. The detailed rules will go in a separate PDF.
  • Cover photo — representative image. A landscape format is recommended (1232x288 ratio) so it displays correctly.
  • Start of entries — date on which users can start submitting photos
  • End date — last day to submit photographs
  • Verdict — date on which the results will be published
  • Price — for a free contest, leave it at 0€
  • Contest rules — PDF file with the official rules

Step 3 — Scope

Define who can participate:

  • Social — association members only
  • National — any user of the platform
  • International — open to international users

Ticking Social also reveals the "Only visible to the association" switch. Turn it on if you don't want the contest to be public:

  • It never appears on the Picstar home page. That listing is public to everyone, so a restricted contest is left out of it — even for your own members.
  • On your association's page only members and administrators see it, and they must be signed in.
  • Anyone following the direct link who is neither a member nor an administrator gets a page-not-found.

The switch only exists for the social scope: remove Social and the contest becomes visible to everyone again. You can change it at any time, including after publishing the contest.

Step 4 — Sponsors (optional)

Sponsors have their own Sponsors tab, with two kinds:

  • Approved sponsors — organisations recognised by Picstar (photographic federations and confederations). You pick them from a list and they already come with their logo and acronym: FIAP, CEF, FCF, FAFPV and FAFIBA. When you select one you are asked for the contest number that organisation assigns to this contest, which you can leave blank. To change it, click the sponsor card and use Update number. To take it off, hover over its card and click the ✕ (Unselect sponsor): the sponsor is unselected and its number goes with it.
  • Other sponsors — you add these yourself with a name, acronym and logo. To change one, click its card and use Update sponsor: you can edit the name, acronym, number and logo. Their contest number is always optional. To remove them, hover over their card and click the ✕ (Remove sponsor).

Sponsors can be changed while the contest is not finished, even once it is published or under way.

If you are a sponsor and would like to become approved, write to us at hola@picstar.es.

Step 5 — Categories

Create one or more categories for the contest. For each one, specify:

  • Category name
  • Number of photos each participant can submit
  • Active — a toggle that controls whether the category is visible on the public page and in the photo submission screen. A disabled category won't show up in either (photos already submitted and their votes aren't affected). You can change it at any point while the contest isn't finished, even after the contest has been published.

Step 6 — Voting

Configure the voting team:

  • Salon Chairman — manages the contest, oversees the voting and assigns the awards at the end. Cannot also be a juror.
  • Jury — one or more users who will vote on the photographs. Search for them by email, nickname or name.
  • Mode:
    • Remote — each juror votes from home
    • In-person — the Salon Chairman manages the votes in the room

Step 7 — Awards

Add the awards to be given. For each one, specify name, description and amount. They can be edited or removed while the contest is in draft.

Step 8 — Images

The Images tab decides which photos the contest accepts. The requirements are checked at submission time: a photo that does not meet them is never uploaded, and the participant sees straight away which requirement failed.

  • Long side — required. It caps the longer side of the photo, whether that is the width or the height, so a panorama and a portrait shot are measured by the same rule.
  • Short side — optional. Left blank, any proportion is accepted as long as the long side fits.
  • Max size — picked from a list, from 1 to 5 MB.
  • Minimum width and Minimum height — optional. Unlike the maximums, these apply to each axis separately: asking for 2000 wide and 3000 tall accepts a portrait photo of 2000×3000 and rejects the same photo rotated, at 3000×2000. Left blank, no minimum is required.
  • Required dpi — optional. These are the pixels per inch the photo must state in its metadata, and the check is exact: ask for 300 and both a 72 dpi photo and a 600 dpi one are rejected. A photo that does not state its resolution is rejected too, and the message tells the participant to export it again stating that resolution. Only JPEG and PNG can store the resolution, so requiring it rules out WebP, AVIF and GIF: anyone submitting one of those is asked to change format.

Participants see these requirements in the upload window before choosing a photo, so they do not discover the limit by failing.

If the minimums you ask for leave no room for any possible photo — a minimum width larger than the long side, for instance — the form will not let you save and points at the conflicting field.

The requirements can no longer be edited once the contest is published.

Draft and publishing

While the contest is in draft, you can save and edit all the details as many times as you need. Once everything is ready, click Publish.

⚠️ Important: once published, the contest cannot be modified or deleted. This protects the participants who have already registered. The exceptions are the sponsors, the jury, the Salon Chairman and each category's Active toggle: you can keep changing them while the contest isn't finished, whatever state it is in (published, started or in the voting phase). That way you can bring in a substitute for a jury member or chairman who drops out at any point, although you can never leave the contest without any active jury or without a chairman. Once the contest is finished or archived, it no longer accepts changes of any kind.

Replacing a jury member

If a jury member drops out, you can remove them and add a substitute from the Voting tab as long as the contest is not finished.

⚠️ Important: if that jury member had already scored some photographs, their votes stop counting towards the results as soon as you remove them, and the substitute starts voting from scratch. If you restore them, their votes count again.

Inviting participants

When you publish a contest, Picstar emails the platform users that match its scope: everyone if it is national or international, and only your association's members if it is social.

If you also keep your own contact list, you can reach them with Invite participants, the button at the top right of the contest detail screen.

  1. Click Invite participants.
  2. Paste the addresses into the text box. You can copy a whole column from your spreadsheet: line breaks, tabs, commas and semicolons all work as separators, and so does the Name Surname <address@domain.com> format.
  3. Below the box you will see how many addresses are valid, how many are duplicates and how many are malformed. Duplicates and malformed addresses are dropped automatically.
  4. Click Send invitations and confirm with Send.

Everyone receives their own email, with the same new contest announcement that Picstar sends, and nobody sees the other addresses.

Before sending, Picstar drops the addresses that are already registered on the platform and have received the automatic announcement for this contest, so that nobody gets it twice. Registered users who have turned off new contest notifications are dropped as well. Once it finishes, a message tells you how many invitations went out and how many were skipped.

⚠️ Important: this action can only be used once per contest. Afterwards the button is disabled and hovering over it shows how many invitations were sent. Check the list carefully before confirming.

The button is available while the contest is published or started and the submission deadline is still open. In every other case it appears disabled, because whoever received the announcement would no longer be able to take part.

Contest statuses

  1. Draft — in preparation, not visible to users
  2. Published — visible but with no activity yet
  3. Started — the system checks every hour whether the start date has arrived. When it does, it automatically switches to this status and participants can start submitting their photos.