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Entering a contest

Finding a contest

From the Picstar home page you can see the available contests. You can browse active contests and filter them to find the one you're interested in.

When you open a contest you will see:

  • Name and description
  • Poster
  • Start and end dates for entries
  • Verdict date
  • A timeline with the contest's three milestones — opening, submission deadline and winners announcement — and which one is under way
  • Entry fee (if it's a paid contest)
  • Available categories
  • Contest rules (downloadable as PDF)
  • Sponsors (if any)

Entering a contest

Free contest

Click Participate and you are registered.

  1. Click Participate
  2. Review the price breakdown (entry fee + taxes if applicable)
  3. Accept the terms and conditions
  4. Click Pay — you'll be redirected to Stripe to complete the payment
  5. Once paid, you are registered automatically

Social contest (members only)

If the contest has social scope, only members of the organizing association can participate. If it is organized by a federation, members of any of the associations that make it up can also participate: if your club belongs to the federation, you can register as a member even if you are not a direct member of the federation.

If you are not a member of any of them, you won't be able to register.

If the contest has an approved sponsor

When you enter a contest sponsored by an organisation that keeps a membership register (FIAP, CEF, FCF, FAFPV or FRF), a notice reminds you that this organisation awards points to its members. If you have not filled in your membership number yet, you can go to memberships to do so, or continue without it: the notice does not block the entry.

Other approved organisations sponsor contests without keeping membership numbers for entrants, such as FAFIBA. When you enter one of their contests you go straight to the entry, with no notice.

Submitting photographs

Once you're registered and the contest is in started status, you can upload your photographs:

  1. Open the contest and select the category you want to enter
  2. Upload your photograph. On upload, the requirements set by the contest are checked —maximum file size, maximum and minimum dimensions and resolution— and if one is not met, you are told which
  3. Each category has a maximum number of photos you can submit

You can only submit photographs while the contest is active. Once the deadline has passed, no more entries are accepted.

You can remove a submitted photo while the contest deadline is still open: click the bin icon on the photo and confirm. The category is left without your work, and you can enter another photo or leave it empty.

Your submitted photographs

Each submitted photo appears on its card in full, uncropped: it is fitted inside a square frame with space around it where needed, so a landscape photo has bands above and below and a portrait one has them at the sides. The top corner shows its aspect ratio (for example, 3:2).

  • The small circle in the bottom-left corner shows the frame colour, white to begin with. Hover over it (or tap it on a phone) to reveal the other two, grey and black, to see a dark or a light photo better. The colour applies to all your photos at once.
  • The magnifier in the bottom-right corner opens the photo full size, with zoom, on the same frame colour.
  • Below it you will see the title and description, the status (Accepted or Disqualified, in which case the reason is shown too), the date and time you submitted it and until when you can change it, with the days left. Once the deadline is over, the card shows Deadline closed with its date.
  • Until the results are published, every photo shows as Accepted: if the organisers disqualify one, you will see it, with the reason, once the results are published.
  • An empty slot lists the requirements the contest sets for the photo (maximum size, dimensions and, if any, the minimum size and the resolution), so you can check them before uploading.

Viewing results

Results do not appear the moment the deadline passes. Two things have to happen: the association must close the contest and then notify the participants. Until that notice goes out the page shows neither the photographs nor the winners, even if the jury has already finished voting. If the contest is listed as finished and you still see nothing, the notice is what's missing.

Once the verdict is public, the contest page shows:

  • Winners — with the awards given, filterable by category
  • Submitted photographs — in three views you switch between with the tabs in the header:
    • Mural — every photo in a grid, sorted from the highest to the lowest average jury score
    • List — a table with the author, category, score and award of each photograph
    • Statistics — works received and selected per category, and the breakdown of authors by country

In contests with many photographs the mural and the list are split into pages, with the paginator underneath; the list shows 20 rows per page.

In the gallery, the eye icon lets you choose what information is shown over each photo (score, author name, their honours and/or title), and the funnel icon filters the photos by category or — when the category has a cut-off defined — by whether they pass it. A third icon appears to clear the filters whenever one is active.

Your entries and awards obtained are also recorded on your public profile.