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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)
  • 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

Step 4 — Sponsors (optional)

If the contest has sponsors, add them by entering a name and description. As many as needed can be added.

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.

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 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.